American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

This is a set of fourteen technical articles by leading American philosophers from a conference at the Center for Inquiry/Transnational (an institutional home of secular humanism) in 2007. They are about the future direction that philosophy in a naturalistic vein should take.

In their preface the editors state: "Naturalism seeks to apply the methods of the empirical sciences to explain natural events without reference to supernatural causes; and it derives ethical values from human experience, not theological grounds" (7). This definition of naturalism hides a rift in the conception of naturalism. Some writers, following Quine, think that the method of philosophy should be that of the empirical sciences. Others think that while philosophy should be informed by the sciences and should not posit extranatural explanations, philosophy is not reducible to empirical procedures. The editors go on to delineate methodological, ontological, and ethical versions of naturalism.

The first part deals with what kind of naturalism deserves a future. Nicholas Rescher holds that humans are amphibious, living in both physical materiality and mental conceptuality, thus amenable to both the causal explanations of science and the hermeneutical explorations of the humanities. The future of naturalism lies with an orientation that is broad enough to allow the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften to cooperate. Intelligence, an integral part of nature, has facilitated the evolution of humans able to use that intelligence for the guidance of action in that nature.

Joseph Margolis wishes to formulate a modified naturalism which charts a middle way between reductionism and extranaturalism and can adequately describe the hybrid (not dualistic) character of human nature which includes both the biological and the cultural and involves both causes and reasons. Along the way he engages in an extended polemic with John McDowell.

For Mario Bunge the value of naturalism is that it rejects magical thinking, yet naturalism is limited, for it denies the emergence of qualitative novelty and qualitative distinctions among levels of organization, physical, biological, and social. Thus it does not account for the distinctiveness of the social and technological. Naturalism promotes inquiry only up to a point. It neglects mathematics and forces social inquiry into the naturalistic box (particularly sociobiology [End Page 88] and evolutionary psychology). It denies the specificity and irreducibility of the social. According to this account of naturalism, human nature is immutable and thus social reform is ineffectual. (He cites Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.) Thus naturalism, once socially progressive, is now conservative. Naturalism should be expanded to encompass the artificial and the social, the economy, politics, and culture. But surely this is an eccentric reading of naturalism. It is as if Santayana, Dewey, and Samuel Alexander were not naturalists! And the reading of Pinker, Dawkins, and Dennett seems forced.

A main job of philosophy, according to John Lachs, is to examine the beliefs on which people act, keeping philosophy free from speculation and irrelevant moves. Primitive naturalism is one such belief. This is not belief in a world as described by scientists but the unuttered conviction that the world is one and that all of its parts have access to all the others. This primitive naturalism promises sensible and lasting results for philosophy. Santayana, in Skepticism and Animal Faith, was the first philosopher to undertake this task.

In part 2, "Can Pragmatism Assist Naturalism?" Sandra Rosenthal finds three senses of "nature": the dense, independently real that is the foundation for all that exists, our environment, and the object of the sciences. A complex naturalism in pragmatism shows that the path to nature is not through conceptual clarity but through attunement to its concrete richness. The metaphysical claims of pragmatic naturalism are fallible, perspectival, and temporal yet ontologically grounded.

John Ryder stresses an overlap between naturalism and pragmatism. Pragmatic naturalism conceives of nature richly enough that there is no need to posit a supernatural. It does not claim that science is the only method of producing knowledge. There is a place for the humanities. Further, a relational view allows us to relate experience and...