Abstract

A plausible and well-worn story about modernity runs that, on the one hand, our naive experience presents us at every turn with a world rich with values, a world in which beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and justice and injustice strike us at every turn as “out there” in the world. But, on the other hand, the “disenchanted” picture of things suggested by modern science confronts us with an impersonal world of physical, mechanical, and biological processes describable in purely material or even mathematical language—a world in which values play no role and have no place. This leaves the philosopher with the challenge of either defending naive experience against scientific encroachment, defending the scientific...