This chapter contains sections titled: Naturalism and Religious Empiricism as World‐view Radical Empiricism and Pragmatism Religious Themes.

This text provides an extensive exploration of the relationship between the thought of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, providing a new argument for the complementarity of their mature philosophies as part of a collaborative metatheory of science. In arguing that both Neurath and Carnap must be interpreted as proponents of epistemological naturalism, and that their naturalisms rest on shared philosophical ground, it is also demonstrated that the boundaries and possibilities for epistemological naturalism are not as restrictive as Quinean (...) orthodoxy has previously suggested. Both building on and challenging the scholarship of the past four decades, this naturalist reading of Carnap also provides a new interpretation of Carnap’s conception of analyticity, allowing for a refutation of the Quinean argument for the incompatibility of naturalism and the analytic/synthetic distinction. In doing so, the relevance and potential importance of their scientific meta-theory for contemporary questions in the philosophy of science is demonstrated. This text appeals to students and researchers working on Logical Empiricism, Quine, the history of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy of science, as well as proponents of naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

Miriam Solomon's social empiricism is marked by emphasis on community level rationality in science and the refusal to impose a distinction between the epistemic and the non-epistemic character of factors ("decision vectors") that incline scientists for or against a theory. While she attempts to derive some norms from the analysis of cases, her insistent naturalism undermines her effort to articulate norms for the (appropriate) distribution of decision vectors.

In this paper, I seek to extract what I call an empiricist mode of existence through a combined reading of two under-researched vectors of Gilles Deleuze's thought: his ‘transcendental empiricism’ and his ‘affirmative naturalism’. This empiricist mode of existence co-positions Deleuze's empiricism and naturalism as pertaining to a stylistics of life which is ontologically experimentalist, epistemologically open, and immanently engaged in the world. That is, a processual praxis of demystification and organising encounters towards joy.

A picture has indeed held modern Western philosophy captive, that of the universe as a vast machine whose iron laws are best understood as exceptionless empirical regularities which, as it were, determine the future before it happens. This fantastic conception commands the assent, not just of positivistically-minded naturalists but of all the great anti-naturalists who champion a very different view of human action as a domain of freedom ¿that somehow cheats science¿. The most fundamental move in Roy Bhaskar¿s system of (...) philosophy, the germ of everything that followed, was to reconceptualise the natural world in transcendental realist terms, ¿turning Kant around using his own method¿. On this account, the universe is characterized by deep structures, mechanisms and fields that generate the flux of phenomena, and is in open, creative and emergent process. This completely recasts the terms of the debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism by remedying its false grounds and shows how philosophy can be liberated from its anthropocentric/anthropomorphic prison and rendered consistent with the best insights of modern natural science. There is necessity in nature quite independent of humans, but in an open world causation is multiple and conjunctural, the actual course of the unfolding of being is highly contingent and the bases of human freedom can be understood scientifically. Written as a DPhil thesis when Bhaskar was in his mid-twenties, Empiricism and the Metatheory of the Social Sciences brilliantly launches this reconceptualisation and explores its implications for social science in the course of carrying through the metatheoretical destruction of empiricism. It will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the development of Bhaskar¿s thought, in transcendental realism, and in the critique of empiricism, more generally of the philosophical discourse of Western modernity. (shrink)

The paper seeks to refute Skorupski's claim in _English-Language Philosophy 1750-1945 that Kant's philosophy was consciously antinaturalist. Skorupski has two related views: (1) that Kant consciously recognised steps from naturalism to empiricism and then to scepticism, and rejected naturalism; (2) that the rejection of naturalism issues in a transcendental account of the mind as outside nature. (1) Is vulnerable to the textual point that Kant never associates naturalism explicitly with the argument Skorupski notes. Indeed the (...) textual references to naturalism do not indicate a clear, single, view of that doctrine in Kant. (2) Is vulnerable to the by now well-known objections to such a traditionalist picture of the mind 'making nature' and so being quite distinct from it. The paper shows that such a naive traditionalist account is over-simple. (shrink)

Epistemology has recently witnessed a number of efforts to rehabilitate rationalism, to defend the existence and importance of a priori knowledge or warrant construed as the product of rational insight or apprehension (Bealer 1987; Bigelow 1992; BonJour 1992, 1998; Burge 1998; Butchvarov 1970; Katz 1998; Plantinga 1993). This effort has sometimes been coupled with an attack on naturalistic epistemology, especially in BonJour 1994 and Katz 1998. Such coupling is not surprising, because naturalistic epistemology is often associated with thoroughgoing empiricism (...) and the rejection of the a priori. In this paper, however, I shall present a conception of naturalistic epistemology that is entirely compatible with a priori justification or knowledge. The resulting conception, I claim, gives us a better appreciation of the respective merits of the rational and the empirical, as well as a better understanding of how moderate epistemological naturalism comports, at least in principle, with moderate rationalism. This paper defends moderate rationalism; but it does not defend everything rationalists have often wanted, only what it is reasonable to grant them. (shrink)

A division has arisen within the naturalist school of moral philosophy, with the contenders being "the emotive theorists vs. the cognitive theorists." the author suggests that the fundamental agreements between the groups far outweigh the peripheral and sometimes illusory disagreements. the article establishes the areas of agreement, deals with illusory disagreements, and indicates the peripheral disagreements can be considered disagreements in emphasis. (staff).

Professor Monro presents an original view of ethics based on empiricism, which leads him to a subjectivist position about moral values. He starts by examining the central problem in moral philosophy: are moral statements objectively true, or are they expressions of preference? The first view conflicts with the empiricist beliefs current in modern thought; the opposing naturalistic theory seems to lead to moral scepticism. After discussing both views, the author presents a detailed defence of the subjectivist position. In the (...) course of his argument he gives a detailed analysis and criticism of the 'universalisability thesis', the theory that moral aspirations differ from others in being applicable to all men, and that it is this that makes them moral. He then offers an alternative account of the nature of moral attitudes. The author illustrates his explanations with straightforward analogies and examples. His clear exposition of the fundamental concepts arising in his argument makes this a book for students as well as for professional moral philosophers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, the author wishes to defend a naturalistic version of phenomenology rooted in and expropriated from William James’s radical empiricism against Max Scheler’s non-naturalistic phenomenology. By drawing from Jack Reynolds’s arguments for a minimal phenomenology, the author posits that radical empiricism is a middle way between the misguided self-sufficiency of transcendental phenomenology and the misguided self-sufficiency of ontological naturalism. The orthodox reading of Scheler as a dualist is found problematic, and in outlining four propositions (...) characteristic of Scheler’s positions, the author motivates resources from Jamesian thought to argue for the superiority of a naturalistic phenomenology. (shrink)

This book presents a thoroughly empiricist account of physics. By providing an overview of the development of empiricism from Ockham to van Fraassen the book lays the foundation for its own version of empiricism. Empiricism for the author consists of three ideas: nominalism, i.e. dismissing second order quantification as unnecessary, epistemological naturalism, and viewing classification of things in natural kinds as a human habit not in need for any justification. The book offers views on the realism-antirealism (...) debate as well as on the individuation of theories as a thoroughly neglected aspect of underdetermination. The book next discusses a broad range of topics, including the predicates body, spatial distance and time interval, the ontology of electromagnetism, propensities, the measurement problem and other philosophical issues in quantum theory. Discussions about the direction of time and about string theory make up the final part of the book. (shrink)

Despite the unexciting title and the implied invitation to travel along the same old dusty road the book contains a great deal of fresh and interesting material, handled with commendable thoroughness and adroitness. Its author, an ethical naturalist is serious about his mission to justify nature to nature and honest in as much as he does not take the easy way out of an impasse by summarily evicting morality out of court. To him moral phenomena are a solid reality—moral expressions (...) and concepts, moral deliberations, decisions and judgments are genuine enough occurrences, not to be explained away as pragmatically convenient inventions or delusions. On the other hand, moral phenomena must not be taken to point to some supra-mundane sphere of values, axiological dimensions and special modes of recognizing them. With respect to these notions we must be ruthless in using Occam’s Razor and get rid of all those awkward and utterly superfluous entities devised by some misguided metaphysicians. Nature is all there is; and, if there is morality, it must be explained or justified solely in terms of nature. This is the task Professor Monro sets himself to perform. (shrink)

This 1979 text addresses the ways in which the dominant theories in large areas of Western social science have been subject to strong criticisms, particularly ...

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...) amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present. (shrink)

The overall claim of this dissertation is that nativism and naturalism are incompatible. Further, given the strength of the nativist arguments against their empirical counterparts, the way is open for an inductive argument for the existence of God. The particular species of nativism currently occupying the role of a dominant research program is linguistic nativism, the view that a grammar or a mental language is innately housed in the human mind. Thus, the argument will focus on showing that the (...) capacity of human beings to acquire natural languages provides evidence for the failure of naturalism and, in so doing, opens the way for a theistic research program. -/- In the first part of the argument in chapters two through four, I argue that nativism is incompatible with naturalism. Nativism is the view that there is something more than a general learning mechanism within the human mind prior to experience. Those things might be beliefs, concepts, or other domain-specific mechanisms. According to nativists, their innate presence in the mind explains the capacity, knowledge, or some other cognitive competence of human beings in their mature state. Nativists include Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz. In contrast, empiricists, including Aristotle, John Locke, and David Hume denied that there is much more than a general-purpose learning mechanism in the mind. They claimed that a combination of a general learning mechanism and the data available from the environment adequately explains the beliefs, concepts, and capacities we acquire. Historically, nativists could not postulate the presence of innate beliefs, concepts, or mechanisms without also embracing a form of non-naturalism. Consequently, most naturalists endorsed versions of empiricism proposed by Locke and Hume. -/- Just as there are nativists and empiricists about concepts and beliefs, there are nativists about language. Indeed, the problem of language acquisition—how a small child has the capacity to learn language—generated a revival in interest in nativism in the 1960s led by linguist, Noam Chomsky. Linguistic nativists claim that language acquisition is only possible if human beings possess certain capacities, structures, concepts, or beliefs. The two dominant nativists at the time were Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor. Chomsky proposed an innate Universal Grammar housed in a domain-specific device in the human brain. Fodor went much further and postulated that an entire language of thought is present in the human mind. Empiricists, on the other hand, claim that the linguistic data extant in the environment of a language learner combined with a general-purpose learning mechanism provides a sufficient explanation for language acquisition in humans. I argue that though nativist arguments against empiricism are at least sufficient to fend off empiricist objections, linguistic nativism turns out to be incompatible with naturalism. Thus, nativists ought to adopt a form of non-naturalism. The bulk of the dissertation will be spent defending this claim. -/- In the second part of the dissertation, I will argue that in place of naturalism, nativists ought to adopt theism. I will suggest that theism uniquely explains human linguistic capacities without facing problems that plague other forms of non-naturalism. Thus, the arguments for nativism turn out to be arguments for theism. Finally, I argue that the entailment does not go the other way. It is not the case that theism entails nativism. Instead, the theist is able to choose from a range of options. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, a naturalistic approach to epistemology seeks to explain human knowledge – and justification in particular – as a phenomenon in the natural world, in keeping with the tenets of naturalism. Naturalism is typically defined, in part, by a commitment to scientific method as the only legitimate means of attaining knowledge of the natural world. Naturalism is often thought to entail empiricism by virtue of this methodological commitment. However, scientific methods themselves may incorporate a priori (...) elements, so empiricism does not follow from the methodological commitments of naturalism alone. And given a suitably-naturalistic conception of the a priori, a priori forms of justification may be compatible with naturalism generally. A priori justification is, in principle, compatible with naturalism – and hence naturalistic epistemologies – if the a priori is understood in a way that is free of some of the inessential properties that have been associated with the concept. I argue that some of the more prominent strategies for accommodating normative notions within a naturalistic framework allow for the possibility of a priori justification. These include reliabilism, instrumental rationality, and nonfactualism about justification. A priori justification thus need not be seen as standing in opposition to all naturalistic epistemologies. It is only with nonnormative naturalistic epistemologies that a priori justification per se is incompatible, and this only because the notion of justification itself has no role to play within a nonnormative approach to epistemology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Naturalistic Empiricism as Process TheologyGary Dorrien (bio)The founders of the Chicago School of Theology sought to develop a fully modernist theology, the first one by their standard. They swept aside the a prioris of Kant and Schleiermacher, declaring that nothing is given and no norm from the past holds legitimate authority. Theologian Shailer Mathews, philosopher of religion George Burman Foster, church historian Shirley Jackson Case, and psychologist of (...) religion Edward Scribner Ames were the founders. They agreed with Ernst Troeltsch that Ritschlian historicism is not true historicism and with William James that lingering over the mystery of subjectivity is a loser for theology and philosophy. Theology had to change to deserve the modernist name. Instead of claiming that religious knowledge is a product of religious experience, theologians should say that religious knowledge is a product of disciplined empirical reflection on experience, especially the experience of external relations. Moreover, the Ritschlian approach of employing a Christian framework to get a Christian answer is illegitimate. The only way to make theology truly modern is to make it as scientific as chemistry, or at least, sociology.The Chicago School had a quintessential figure in each of its first three generations. Mathews was the emblematic founder, Henry Nelson Wieman defined the second generation, and Bernard Meland defined the third generation. Each generation had a process orientation that distinctly ventured theological claims. Mathews led the Divinity School as dean from 1908 to 1933, crafting a socio-historical theology of evolutionary process, functional patterns, value theory, and cultural progress. Wieman developed a theological behaviorism that touted its empirical objectivity and opened the door to the organic metaphysical system of Alfred North Whitehead, though Wieman subsequently tried to close the door. One stream of Wieman’s protégés stuck with his approach and another stream tacked back to Whitehead. Meland synthesized the history of the Chicago School, pulled it in Whitehead’s direction, and later regretted that Whitehead, philosopher Charles Hartshorne, and process theology were too scholastic. Process theology, Meland believed, should be more theopoetic, more culturally attuned, and less scholastic—a prescription with an ample future once feminist theology entered this field. [End Page 5]I. Shailer Mathews and the Early Chicago SchoolThe University of Chicago was the product of John D. Rockefeller’s money, Midwest Baptist anxieties about falling behind other denominations, and William Rainey Harper’s vision of a modern Baptist university. Harper, a Hebrew Bible scholar, and a phenomenally enterprising administrator, founded the university in 1890, stocking it with faculty stars he plucked mostly from New England colleges and universities. Mathews was not a star, or thought to be brilliant. Raised in the staid, thoroughly middle-class, evangelical ethos of Portland, Maine, he was educated at Colby College in Maine, befriending sociologist Albion Small, who became Colby’s president in 1888. Small opened a succession of doors for Mathews—seminary at Newton Theological Institution, a faculty position at Colby in public speaking, graduate study in sociology at the University of Berlin, teaching sociology at Colby, and in 1894, two years after Small moved to Chicago to found the nation’s first sociology department, following Small to Chicago. Harper chaired the Old Testament Department, Mathews’s former teacher at Newton, Ernest DeWitt Burton, chaired the New Testament Department, and Mathews was hired to teach New Testament history, never mind that he had no training in it except whatever Burton had taught him. Burton told Mathews not to worry—his Berlin training in sociology should apply just fine to New Testament history. The University of Chicago had a mission to make religion relevant again, and Mathews could help with that.1Harper enlisted him to serve as an extension of himself in Harper’s numerous endeavors. Mathews was really good at representing Harper, speaking for him on the road, hustling back to Chicago for classes, and enjoying his dual role. To ground himself in his acquired field, Mathews wrote a series of articles on “Christian Sociology” that became his first book, The Social Teaching of Jesus (1897). Christian sociology, he explained, was the use of social science to explicate the objective meaning of Christianity, an overdue enterprise. A scientific reading... (shrink)

An explicit philosophy and meta-philosophy of positivism, empiricism and popperianism is provided. Early popperianism is argued to be essentially a form of empiricism, the deviations from empiricism are traced. In contrast, the meta-philosophy and philosophy of an evolutionary naturalistic realism is developed and it is shown how the maximal conflict of this doctrine with all forms of empiricism at the meta-philosophical level both accounts for the form of its development at the philosophical level and its defense (...) against attack from nonrealist quarters. Following an earlier article on realism of similar theme (Synthese 26 (1974), 409) this paper then further explores the ramifications of a thoroughgoing realist position. (shrink)

W. V. Quine calls some general methods of science maxims: general defeasible principles that call on us to approximate, maximize, or minimize a state and that are interpreted and weighed in context-sensitive ways. On my reading, his empiricism asks us to maximize accepting overall theories empirically equivalent to ours but to minimize accepting sentences that both do not affect the empirical content of our overall theory and do not simplify our overall theory. His naturalism asks us to maximize (...) accepting sentences that are solely supported by standards that support our best current scientific theory. Drawing on the Quine archive at Houghton Library at Harvard, I support and apply these interpretations by investigating his rapidly evolving later work on empirical content and empirical equivalence, including some of his views on translation in this later work and his vacillation between what he calls the ecumenical and sectarian attitudes. (shrink)

A common objection raised against naturalism is that a naturalized epistemology cannot account for the essential normative character of epistemology. Following an analysis of different ways in which this charge could be understood, it will be argued that either epistemology is not normative in the relevant sense, or if it is, then in a way which a naturalized epistemology can account for with an instrumental and hypothetical model of normativity. Naturalism is here captured by the two doctrines of (...) empiricism and gradualism. Epistemology is a descriptive discipline about what knowledge is and under what conditions a knowledge-claim is justified. However, we can choose to adopt a standard of justification and by doing so be evaluated by it. In this sense our epistemic practices have a normative character, but this is a form of normativity a naturalized epistemology can make room for. The normativity objection thus fails. However, in the course of this discussion, as yet another attempt to clarify the normativity objection, such a naturalistic model will be contrasted with Donald Davidson’s theory of interpretation. Even though this comparison will not improve upon the negative verdict upon the original objection, it will be argued that naturalism cannot accept Davidson’s theory since it contains at least one constitutive principle – the principle of charity – whose epistemic status is incompatible with the naturalistic doctrine of gradualism. So, if this principle has this role, then epistemology cannot be naturalized. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the naturalism of Carnap and Quine. I examine Quine's naturalized epistemology and argue that Carnap's naturalism is considerably more attractive.

We outline an alternative to both scientific and liberal naturalism which attempts to reconcile Sellars’ apparently conflicting commitments to the scientific accountability of human nature and the autonomy of the space of reasons. Scientific naturalism holds that agency and associated concepts are a mechanical product of the realm of laws, while liberal naturalism contends that the autonomy of the space of reason requires that we leave nature behind. The third way we present follows in the footsteps of (...) German Idealism, which attempted to overcome the Kantian chasm between nature and agency, and is thus dubbed ‘post-Kantian.’ We point to an overlooked group of scholars in the naturalism debate who, along with recent work in biology and cognitive science, offer a path to overcome the reductive tendencies of empiricism while avoiding the dichotomy of logical spaces. We then bring together these different streams of research, by foregrounding and expanding on what they share: the idea of organisms as living agents and that of a continuity without identity between life and mind. We qualify this as a bottom-up transformative approach to rational agency, which grounds cognition in the intrinsically purposive nature of organisms, while emphasizing the distinction between biological agency and full-fledged mindedness. (shrink)

This paper argues that naturalistic philosophy does not meet its own empiricist mandate. It argues from an empiricist perspective. Naturalists either claim that philosophy is like science in significant ways, or they claim that philosophy ought to be like science. This paper, being chiefly focused on the former claim, argues that naturalistic philosophy is nothing like science. Using Papineau’s markers for the similarities between naturalistic philosophy and science, I argue, counter Papineau, that the method employed in naturalistic philosophy is not (...) a posteriori and its claims are certainly not synthetic in the same way as that of science. This methodological distinction between science and philosophy is one made by Carnap. To show how the methods are distinct I compare two papers; I compare the method employed by Andy Clark in his philosophical paper on the brain as a prediction error minimisation machine with that employed by Rees and Haynes in their neuroscientific paper on mental content. (shrink)

What do the biology and psychology of morality have to do with normative ethics? Our answer is, a great deal.We argue that normative ethics is an ongoing, ever-evolving research program in what is best conceived as human ecology.

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I (...) shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

Historical reconstructions of the effects of the intellectual migration are typically informed by one of two conflicting narratives. Some scholars argue that refugee philosophers, in particular the logical positivists, contributed to the demise of distinctly American schools of thought. Others reject this ‘eclipse view’ and argue that postwar analytic philosophy can best be characterized as a synthesis of American and positivist views. This paper studies the fate of one of the most influential schools of U.S. philosophy—Columbia naturalism—and argues that (...) both narratives are part of a larger story. First, I reconstruct the rise of the Columbia school, focusing on its naturalist analyses of science, morality, and religion as well as its contributions to the history of ideas. Next, I trace some of the naturalists’ contacts with German philosophers and show that they encountered a strong bifurcation between historical and scientific philosophy in their discussions. I argue that a similar distinction gradually infected debates between naturalists, eventually resulting in a split within the Columbia school itself. The historically-oriented naturalists, I argue, were overshadowed by the analytic movement, whereas the science-minded naturalists were able to incorporate the views of the émigrés, thereby developing the tradition in new directions. (shrink)

This paper argues that a priori justification is, in principle, compatible with naturalism—if the a priori is understood in a way that is free of the inessential properties that, historically, have been associated with the concept. I argue that empirical indefeasibility is essential to the primary notion of the a priori ; however, the indefeasibility requirement should be interpreted in such a way that we can be fallibilist about apriori-justified claims. This fallibilist notion of the a priori accords with (...) the naturalist’s commitment to scientific methodology in that it allows for apriori-justified claims to be sensitive to further conceptual developments and the expansion of evidence. The fallibilist apriorist allows that an a priori claim is revisable in only a purely epistemic sense. This modal claim is weaker than what is required for a revisability thesis to establish empiricism, so fallibilist apriorism represents a distinct position. (shrink)

Carnap’s Ideal of Explication and Naturalism is the second book on Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy edited by Pierre Wagner for Palgrave Macmillan’s series The History of Analytic Philosophy. The collection of essays is important for several reasons both for philosophers and historians of philosophy, but some parts of it will also be valuable to anyone interested in general scientific methodologies. I shall first survey the theme in order to locate the collection within the recent philosophical discussion then I will consider (...) the volume itself. (shrink)

Mathematics poses a difficult problem for methodological naturalists, those who embrace scientific method, and also for ontological naturalists who eschew non-physical entities such as Cartesian souls. Mathematics seems both essential to science but also committed to abstract non-physical entities while methodologically it seems to have no place for experiment or empirical confirmation. The chapter critically reviews a number of responses naturalists have made including logicism, Quinean radical empiricism, and Penelope Maddy’s variant thereof and suggests some further problems both for (...) ontological and for methodological naturalists. (shrink)

Examining James M. Gustafson's views on the relationships between the sciences, theology, and ethics from a scientifically based naturalistic philosophical perspective, I concur with his rejection of separatist and antagonistic interactionist positions and his adherence to a mutually supportive interactionist position with both descriptive and normative features. I next explore three aspects of this interactionism: religious empiricism, the connections between facts and values, and the centering of objective values in the divine. Here I find much accord between Gustafson's theocentrism (...) and a scientifically based naturalistic philosophical account of the relationships between the sciences, theology, and ethics. (shrink)

As British and American idealism waned, new realisms displaced them. The common background of these new realisms emphasized the problem of the external world and the mind-body problem, as bequeathed by Reid, Hamilton, and Mill. During this same period, academics on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that the natural sciences were making great strides. Responses varied. In the United States, philosophical response focused particularly on functional psychology and Darwinian adaptedness. This article examines differing versions of that response in William (...) James and Roy Wood Sellars. James viewed the mind as a “fighter for ends.” His neutral monism, by taming the mind-body problem and the problem of the external world, provided a secure metaphysics of mind as functional activity. In contrast, Sellars ’s scientific realism endorsed physical reality but was not mechanistic or reductionist. His critical realism and evolutionary naturalism offered novel metaphysical and epistemological positions in comparison with other American and British realisms. James and Sellars are distinguished from British philosophy in 1890–1918 in the types of realism they endorsed and in their success at introducing Darwinian evolutionary considerations and functional psychology into mainstream philosophy. (shrink)

Advances in modern mathematics indicate that progress in this field of knowledge depends mainly on culturally inflected imaginative intuitions, or intuitive imaginings—which mysteriously result in the growth of systems of symbolism that are often efficacious, although fallible and very likely evolutionary. Thus the idea that a trouble-free epistemology can be constructed out of an intuition-free mathematical naturalism would seem to be question begging of a very high order. I illustrate the point by examining Philip Kitcher’s attempt to frame an (...) empiricist philosophy of mathematics, which he calls “mathematical naturalism,” wherein he proposes to explain novelty in mathematics by means of the notion of ‘rational interpractice transitions,’ only to end with an appeal to science to supply a meaning for rationality. A more promising naturalistic approach is adumbrated by Noam Chomsky who begins with a straightforward acceptance of mind and language as ‘natural’ or concrete facts which bespeak the need for a linguistic faculty. This indicates in turn that there may also be a mathematical faculty capable of generating and exploiting the powers of mathematical symbolisms in a manner analogous to the linguistic faculty. (shrink)

_Hume's Naturalism_ provides a clear and concise guide to the debates over whether Hume's empiricism or his 'naturalism' in the tradition of the Scottish 'Common Sense' school of philosophy gained his upper hand. This debate is central to any understanding of Hume's thought. H.O. Mounce presents a beautifully clear guide to Hume's most important works, _The Treatise on Human Nature_ and _Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion_. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume for the first time, _Hume's Naturalism_ affords a (...) much needed overview of the key concepts of empiricism, causation, scepticism, reason and morality that are essential to any understanding of Hume's philosophy. (shrink)

Rationalism bears a closer association with religion than empiricism does; the former offers a conception of the world that links the deepest truths of nature to the deepest thoughts of the human mind in a way that makes many people nervous. Nagel reassures defenders of atheism that they have no more reason to fear fundamental and irreducible mind–world relations than fundamental and irreducible laws of physics. Although Nagel endorses Robert Nozick's evolutionary explanation of human reason, which reverses the Kantian (...) dependence of facts upon reason, Nagel argues that an evolutionary story about reason must be coupled with an independent basis for confidence in reason. To be justified in trusting our reasoning capacity as a product of Darwinian natural selection, we must be justified in trusting it simply in itself in virtue of the content of its arguments. To the question, How can a biological species shaped by the contingencies of natural selection have access to self‐justifying reason?, Nagel offers the defensive reply that we do not know how biological possibilities and their likelihood of actualization are constrained by fundamental laws of nature. (shrink)

I said that the book is brilliant. This is not so much because of the conclusions eventually reached about the inadequacy of a purely naturalistic approach to mind. These conclusions are already familiar in the work of Donald Davidson and others. Rather, it is because of the accumulation of historical detail and insight on the basis of which these conclusions are reached. It is often said, for instance, that Kant is a watershed figure, in some sense synthesizing and then moving (...) beyond both empiricism and naturalism. Hatfield uses these terms. But he reinvests them with meaning and energy and in the process shows how radical Kant was in refocusing, by way of a sharp distinction between empirical and transcendental inquiries, the central questions of philosophy. (shrink)

Joel Katzav's survey of the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna's philosophy covers a broad range of ideas, and I have selected three for further development and commentary: (1) the relationship between naturalism and analytic philosophy, (2) the relationship between classical and radical empiricism, and (3) the historical question of where to situate a view such as de Laguna's in the history, the present, and the future of philosophy. I suggest that the view belongs with a group I (...) call the ‘New Naturalists’, including Theodore de Laguna, Susanne Langer, Marjorie Grene, Michael Polanyi, and others who keep philosophy closer to developments in natural and social science than is typical for pragmatists, process philosophers, and analytic philosophers. This is a position somewhere between classical and radical empiricism, but which insists that reductionism is too limiting and unwise, even when restricted to being only a method. (shrink)

Philosophical naturalism is a cluster of views and impulses typically taken to include atheism, physicalism, radical empiricism or naturalized epistemology, and some sort of relativism, subjectivism or nihilism about morality. I argue that a problem arises when the naturalist offers the argument from evil for atheism. Since the argument from evil is a moral argument, it cannot be effectively deployed by anyone who holds the denatured ethical theories that the naturalist typically holds. In the context of these naturalistic (...) ethical theories, the argument from evil typically fails to provide good reason for either the naturalist or the theist to disbelieve in the God of theism. This does not prove that naturalism is false, or that the argument from evil is unsound, but rather that certain naturalists’ use of the argument has been misguided. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Pragmatism's Reputed Place in the Empiricist Tradition Peirce's Naturalist Account of Truth Pragmatism and Minimalism Experience: Physical, Mathematical, Metaphysical, and Moral.

I am not equipped with capacities which fit one for the office of a lexicographical autocrat, and I shall make no attempt to tell what naturalism must or should signify. But I may take advantage of the opportunity to say what empirical naturalism, or naturalistic empiricism, means to me. I can not hope to offer anything new, or anything which I have not said many times already. But perhaps by concentrating on this point I may make the (...) tenor of my thinking clearer, and incidentally throw some light on why it appears, from two opposite ends of the philosophic gamut, to be half-hearted. (shrink)

I wish to comment upon Mr. Hendel's suggestion along two lines: 1) the feasibility of Hume's solution; and 2) the implications of empiricism for man's freedom as knower and agent. Of course, Hume's skepticism did draw the "sting out of physical necessity and made it harmless," as Hendel indicates. But the force of this skepticism was also to impugn reason--or reasoning--and this the philosophes were unwilling to countenance. That man was an unknowable factor in an equally unknowable universe did (...) not fit in with their notion of a proper fruit of the philosophical enterprise. And though they were caught between the demands of the moral life and the persuasion of the scientific world view, their belief, that they should stick with the problem of talking about man and his world in the same categories without being skeptical about either, was sound. They must have felt that skepticism was a relatively easy and simple expedient, and a position incompatible with that of scientific naturalism. (shrink)