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Naturalism dominated twentieth century American philosophy.1 Naturalism is a philosophical worldview that relies upon experience, reason, and especially science for developing an understanding of reality. Naturalism demands that these three modes of understanding together shall control our notion of reality. Varieties of naturalism emerge because t...
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The absence of a philosophical system that can effectively address the profound problems that exist at the heart of psychology has resulted in the discipline becoming increasingly defined and unified simply by its commitment to the scientific method. This article articulates why unification via method is a weak intellectual solution and explains ho...
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... By contrast, the methodological component is concerned with ways of investigating reality, and claims some kind of general authority for the scientific method" [4]. An interesting and more detailed classification of different possible positions is provided by John Shook [6]. He views naturalism as "a philosophical worldview that relies upon experience, reason, and especially science for developing an understanding of reality … [and maintains] that these three modes of understanding together shall control our notion of reality" [6; p.1]. ...
The article discusses varieties of naturalism and the fundamental disagreement about reductionism versus perspectivism. The central part of the article focuses on Andrej Ule’s idea about experiential perspective and the possibility of naturalizing the mind. I must confess I am not able to pin down all his suggestions about how to accommodate experiential perspectivity in nature, but I certainly find his ideas thought-provoking and inspiring.
... The technical classification for the pragmatic naturalism most respectful towards learning is the Perspectival Pluralism variety of naturalism. Henceforth, we shall speak of 'pragmatic' naturalism to indicate this perspectival and pluralist kind of naturalism (see Shook 2011). ...
Neuropragmatism is a research program taking sciences about cognitive development and learning methods most seriously, in order to reevaluate and reformulate philosophical issues. Knowledge, consciousness, and reason are among the crucial philosophical issues directly affected. Pragmatism in general has allied with the science-affirming philosophy of naturalism. Naturalism is perennially tested by challenges questioning its ability to accommodate and account for knowledge, consciousness, and reason. Neuropragmatism is in a good position to evaluate those challenges. Some ways to defuse them are suggested here, along with recommendations about the specific kind of naturalism, a pluralistic and perspectival naturalism, that neuropragmatism should endorse.
... Most working scientists and philosophers of mind operate under the banner of naturalism. Whatever is meant by naturalism, one of its defining features is the rejection of supernatural forces and explanations (see Shook 2011 andPrice 2013). Thus the divine beneficence, which has kept the correspondence relation between mind and world together, no longer holds. ...
Cognitive science and its philosophy have been far too long consumed with representation. This concern is indicative of a creeping Cartesianism that many scientists and philosophers wish to evade. However, their naturalism is often insufficiently evolutionary to fully appreciate the lessons of pragmatism. If cognitive neuroscience and pragmatism are to be mutually beneficial, the representational-friendly scientists and the anti-representational pragmatists need an alternative to representation that still accounts for what many find so attractive about representation, namely intentionality. I propose that instead of representations we philosophers and scientists begin thinking in terms of cultural affordances. Like Gibsonian affordances, cultural affordances are opportunities for action. However, unlike Gibsonian affordances, which are merely biological and available for immediate action in the immediately present environment, cultural affordances also present opportunities for thinking about the past and acting into the future—tasks typically attributed to representations.
John Dewey’s naturalism requires viewing nature and experience from the perspective of holism, emphasising the continuity between these two. To Dewey, nature is not a fixed entity, but an event in an ongoing process of unfolding. The temporality of an event can meet Dewey’s requirement of constructing a philosophical notion about change and development. The event has a relatively stable structure. The continuity between living things and non-living things becomes possible because of the characteristic transactions of events, and experience thus becomes something emergent in nature and actively intervenes in its unfolding. The emergence of human intelligence and the application of language has lifted nature to a controllable and operable plane, making experience a crucial guide for the unfolding of nature.
Grace Andrus de Laguna was a leading figure in American philosophy for much of thde 20th century, but she is not much read today. He views anticipate and in some ways surpass the achievements of naturalistic philosophy in the decades after her death (1979). In this article, Auxier argues that her philosophy is best understood as belonging to a movement in thought he calls "the New Naturalism," analogous the "New Realism." Other important contributors to this non-reductionist version of philosophical naturalism are Susanne Langer and Marjorie Greene. They share not only a deep respect for and knowledge of the life sciences, but they also develop detailed and still viable theories of perception, knowledge, and language from this basis. They share a commitment to empiricism, but not the classical type, and not quite radical empiricism; it is rather a common sense sort of empiricism, not far from G.E. Moore and the roots of analytic philosophy, before it became dogmatic (in Quine's sense of the dogmas).
Pragmatism is the philosophy of the future, and semiotics is the approach to language that suits pragmatism best. But pragmatism and semiotics, in spite of their long history, are not adequately integrated. This chapter outlines a collection of ideas for integrating contemporary semiotics (mainly Eco's theory) with classical and contemporary pragmatism in a way that improves both pragmatism and semiotics. The natural move is to an open semiotics. The desideratum, as it is explained, is a "truly general theory of signs."
The two-volume Cambridge History of Atheism offers an authoritative and up to date account of a subject of contemporary interest. Comprised of sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this History is comprehensive in scope. The essays are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and classics. Offering a global overview of the subject, from antiquity to the present, the volumes examine the phenomenon of unbelief in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish societies. They explore atheism and the early modern Scientific Revolution, as well as the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and its continuing implications. The History also includes general survey essays on the impact of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as contemporary assessments of thinking. Providing essential information on the nature and history of atheism, The Cambridge History of Atheism will be indispensable for both scholarship and teaching, at all levels.
A fundamental question for philosophy of science asks, How is knowledge of the world created? A pragmatist approach is constructed to show how discovery and justification are tightly related during the creation of scientific knowledge. Procedural abduction, at the scientific level of Strict Abduction and higher, integrates the learnable (postulations undergoing conceptual development) and the logical (hypotheses undergoing rational scrutiny) quite thoroughly. Discovery and justification are functionally fused together within the organized process of procedural abduction by scientific communities. Four questions posed at the start are answered by this pragmatist philosophy of science as follows. (1) Is scientific creativity methodologically related to scientific justification? Answer: scientific creativity is integral to abductive procedures yielding scientific justification. (2) Can a distinction between genuine science and pseudo-science be clearly defined? Answer: genuine science is distinguished by the application of procedural abduction at the level of Strict Abduction or higher. (3) Does scientific knowledge achieve the legitimacy of scientific realism? Answer: procedural abduction legitimates the credibility of highly-confirmed hypotheses and hence justifies scientific realism. (4) How are scientific communities responsible for establishing scientific knowledge? Answer: scientific communities using procedural abduction realize (in both cognitive and constructive senses) scientific knowledge.
Atheology is the intellectual effort to understand atheism, defend the reasonableness of unbelief, and support nonbelievers in their encounters with religion. This book presents a historical overview of the development of atheology from ancient thought to the present day. It offers in-depth examinations of four distinctive schools of atheological thought: rationalist atheology, scientific atheology, moral atheology, and civic atheology. John R. Shook shows how a familiarity with atheology's complex histories, forms, and strategies illuminates the contentious features of today's atheist and secularist movements, which are just as capable of contesting each other as opposing religion. The result is a book that provides a disciplined and philosophically rigorous examination of atheism's intellectual strategies for reasoning with theology. Systematic Atheology is an important contribution to the philosophy of religion, religious studies, secular studies, and the sociology and psychology of nonreligion.
