WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES • VOLUME 12 • NUMBER 1 • SPRING 2016 • PP. 19-35 TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM: COMBINING THE INSIGHTS OF HUSSERL AND DEWEY GREGORY A. TROTTER This paper examines the status of naturalism in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and John Dewey. Despite the many points of overlap and agreement between Husserl's and Dewey's philosophical projects, there remains one glaring difference, namely, the place and status of naturalism in their approaches. For Husserl, naturalism is an enemy to be vanquished. For Dewey, naturalism is the only method that can put philosophy back in touch with the concerns of human beings. This paper will demonstrate the remarkable similarities between Husserl's and Dewey's thought before contending that Dewey's "naturalistic humanism" offers a conception of naturalism which is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology. Furthermore, reading these two philosophers together, this paper argues, can point the way forward to a naturalism which avoids the dismissal of the contributions made by knowing subjects carried out by dominant contemporary strains of reductive naturalism. GREGORY A. TROTTER 20 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 n The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology - the last work published before his death and the last in a seemingly endless series of "introductions" to phenomenology - Edmund Husserl calls into question the implicit presuppositions on which the sciences, including philosophy, stand. These presuppositions, he argues, are carried over from the subjective perspective from which scientific inquiry is necessarily conducted. In the lecture which opens the Crisis, Husserl points out to his audience that despite the great success of the sciences, a crisis has nevertheless arisen precisely because human experience has been forgotten as the ground of scientific investigation. Because of this, Husserl contends, we are no longer asking the right questions. He writes, "The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the 'prosperity' they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity...questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence" (Husserl 1970, 5-6). While Husserl focuses on an emergent crisis of the sciences, John Dewey emphasizes a crisis that has arisen within philosophy itself.1 Lamenting the vestiges of antiquated idealist and supernaturalist philosophies which maintain a stronghold in contemporary philosophy, Dewey argues that the positing of nonempirical phenomena, that is, anything which can be said to exist outside the bounds of the natural world, leads to a neglect of the very serious problems that must be dealt with here and now. In other words, we have forgotten the questions which matter to us most in our everyday experience. Thus, Dewey, like Husserl, passionately argues for a return to human experience. But unlike Husserl, Dewey explicitly advocates for a naturalistic approach. For Dewey, this is the only method up to the task, the only one that can lead us back to what he calls "primary experience." But for Husserl, naturalism is precisely the method that presents the greatest obstacle to a return to experience. Given their common I TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM 21 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 goal of retrieving the experiential ground of scientific and philosophic investigations, how could they have arrived at such different views about the method by which this task is to be carried out? In what follows, I try to answer this question by arguing that Dewey's particular brand of naturalism, what he calls "naturalistic humanism," shares more in common with phenomenology than it does with contemporary versions of reductive naturalism. I think that when read together, the philosophical projects of Husserl and Dewey offer a form of naturalism that can serve as a powerful alternative to dominant contemporary strains of reductionism. The aim of the present paper will not be to suggest that Dewey is himself a phenomenologist or, conversely, that Husserl is a pragmatist. As Victor Kestenbaum warns of such an approach, "Too much of Dewey's meaning has been overlooked or misinterpreted as a result of the ascription of one label after another to his philosophy. Certainly, to burden Dewey's philosophy with one more label cannot possibly serve any reasonable end" (Kestenbaum 1977, 5). While Husserl has been subject to much less obscuring interpretations, I do not want to risk concealing the importance of either of their respective projects. Rather, the idea is to look at the best insights of both philosophers regarding human modes of knowing and interacting with the world in an effort to get closer to a form of naturalism that does not require that we give up on the contributions to experience made by experiencing subjects. In this sense, the "toward" in my title should be taken seriously. This project presents a way forward for thinking of naturalism along these lines while leaving open for further development the precise path such an approach should take. HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF NATURALISM Naturalism is an ambiguous term, to say the least, and this despite the fact that, by most accounts, it is the dominant contemporary philosophical paradigm. In its broadest construal, naturalism simply holds that we should include in our ontology GREGORY A. TROTTER 22 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 only entities which exist in the natural world. However, as Barry Stroud points out, the controversy over naturalism is not about whether one ought to be a naturalist but rather over "what is and what is not to be included in one's conception of 'nature'" (Stroud 2004, 22). Importantly, one's method of investigating the natural world will depend on what one takes to be included in one's conception of nature. Thus, we can distinguish between ontological and methodological aspects of naturalism. The ontological aspect provides an account of what there is, of what kinds of objects are included in nature, and the methodological aspect provides an account of how those objects should be studied.2 Husserl seeks to thwart naturalism as a methodological approach, specifically as applied to the study of human subjectivity. However, for Husserl, methodological naturalism is not sharply separated from certain naturalistic ontological claims, particularly of the physicalist variety. As Dermot Moran points out, Husserl associated naturalism "with a parallel commitment to physicalism and, in his day, sense-data positivism" (Moran 2013, 92). For him, consciousness is not some object which can be isolated and empirically studied. Many strains of naturalism suggest this approach. Certain forms of physicalism, for instance, would make of the mind something which can be studied as nothing more than brain states. As long as we have the appropriate tools to examine the structure of the brain, we will be able to learn everything there is to know about the mind, too. As Stroud summarizes this approach, "physicalism says that the natural world is exhausted by all the physical facts. That is all and only what the natural world amounts to on this view; there is nothing else in nature...It not only states all the physical facts, which presumably can be determined by broadly naturalistic means, but it goes on to say that those are all the facts there are-that they are the whole truth about the world" (Stroud 2014, 27). On this view, everything can, in principle, be studied in an empirical fashion; every object, including human consciousness, can be an object for empirical science. In other words, the same methodological approach deployed when studying the brain, for instance, can be deployed TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM 23 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 vis-à-vis the nature of subjectivity itself. If we accept the point that all there is are physical facts, then subjectivity is rendered just one among many physical objects that can be studied by strictly empirical means. For Husserl, however, we lose something crucial if we approach the study of subjectivity in this way. It is important to note that Husserl does not question the tremendous importance of empirical science. The empirical sciences have achieved significant successes and have contributed in countless ways to our understanding of ourselves and our world. But he warns that it is precisely the great success of the empirical sciences that has engendered a kind of blind faith in their ability to uncover everything about the world, including how it is that we humans experience the world in the ways that we do. Problems arise when the positive sciences extend their reach into the domain of human experience, attempting to explain human subjectivity as if it were merely one object among other objects. We can detect the continued deployment of this line of thinking in the contemporary drive to discover the neurobiological correlates of consciousness, for instance. For Husserl, however, consciousness is not a mere object. Rather, it is the condition for the possibility of experiencing objects, of having any experience at all. Naturalism, conceived as a methodological approach to the study of human subjectivity, is the problem threatening a proper understanding of ourselves: thus, a formidable foe that must be vanquished. To see why Husserl thinks this way, let us look more closely at his project in the Crisis, one of his most sustained engagements with the problems posed by naturalism. History occupies a central place in the Crisis, a place it does not, for the most part, occupy in any of Husserl's other works. He is concerned with how it is that the world means something to us. More specifically, Husserl is concerned to uncover the way in which worldly meaning has been constituted. I mean here the way in which, for instance, language, art, and other cultural objects can be immediately apprehended as meaningful. His answer to this question involves the way in which the plurality of conscious subjects in the world intertwine in order to achieve an GREGORY A. TROTTER 24 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 understanding of meanings which are co-constituted, coexperienced, and intersubjectively verifiable. The way in which Husserl goes about uncovering this constitution of meaning involves a unique historical operation, a kind of genealogy which directs questions not into the factual or empirical state of affairs of a particular historical moment, but rather into the conditions for the possibility of the meanings we find readymade in the world today. Through this genealogical procedure, tradition is revealed to be the vehicle of worldly meaning, the way in which meaning is handed down through generations, appropriated, and furthered. To make this a bit clearer, consider geometry, a science that serves as an example throughout the Crisis of this form of meaning constitution and to which Husserl devoted a short essay (published as an appendix to the Crisis) entitled, "The Origin of Geometry."3 The formal science of geometry originated with Euclid and was further developed into something more like the geometry we know today by Galileo. But when we undertake a geometrical problem, we need not approach the world in the way that Euclid or Galileo did, that is, without a developed science of geometry. We do not need to achieve the original insight of Euclid in order to solve a geometrical problem. Rather, we can plug in certain theorems, say, the Pythagorean Theorem, and thereby solve our problem without achieving the genuine insight of the first geometers. And the reason that we can do this is because geometry is a science which has been handed down in the form of a tradition ever since its inception in the mind of Euclid. Geometry has been appropriated and built upon by subsequent geometers with the discovery of ever new applications and theorems. There is an entire history of thought and practice which is bound up with every application of the Pythagorean Theorem. How is this genealogy supposed to achieve the radical reorientation of scientific inquiry for which Husserl is advocating? The idea here is to exhibit the science of geometry, and science in general, as precisely a human accomplishment rather than a form of inquiry that reveals pure, objective truths about the world. Geometry, he shows, had to be constituted by a particular TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM 25 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 consciousness with a particular point of view on the world. What gets lost in our unquestioning application of scientific methodologies is that someone had to develop those procedures and methods. Methods of geometrical measurement, for example, were developed in response to a certain practical need, the need to build sturdier structures, for example (in this regard, there appears to be a definite pragmatic current running through Husserlian phenomenology). When we forget this aspect of science, when we forget that scientific methods are developed out of human thought and practice, we begin to think of them as rendering truths about the world unadulterated by subjective presuppositions and attitudes. As Dermot Moran points out, "The peculiar manner in which the world and objects in the world appear to consciousness, their 'phenomenality,' is not simply an objective fact in the world but rather an accomplishment of an interwoven web of subjectivities that in this sense transcend the world and are presupposed by the sciences that study the world" (Moran 2013, 90). In the naturalistic practice of science, by contrast, the world is taken for granted as really existing and as being a certain way apart from its being perceived by a subject. But as Moran points out, "[n]aturalism betrays the very essence of science. It misunderstands the world because it misunderstands the subject's necessary role in the project of knowledge. One cannot subtract the knowing subject from the process of knowledge, and treat the desiccated product as if it were the real world" (ibid., 92-3). If this is our approach to the world, then we will always miss a crucial aspect of it - arguably the most important aspect, namely, our contribution as knowing subjects to the constitution of meaning which is rooted in our subjective and intersubjective perspective. For Husserl, every consciousness must take a point of view on the world. Thus, even the purportedly objective perspective taken by science is necessarily rooted in the subjective perspectives of the scientists engaged in inquiry. What Moran calls naturalistic objectivism "takes a stance that does not know it is a stance" (ibid., 105). The "subjective-relative" domain of the life-world GREGORY A. TROTTER 26 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 "constantly functions as a subsoil" in all our dealings with the world (Husserl 1970, 124). Recognition of this fact is crucial for the development of the sciences and philosophy. In this way, Husserl argues that a reductionist form of naturalism cannot fully explain our relation to the world insofar as it ignores and leaves unquestioned its own condition of possibility, namely, conscious, subjective experience. DEWEY'S NATURALISTIC HUMANISM AND ITS RELATION TO PHENOMENOLOGY On a first approach, it seems that Dewey's thought apropos naturalism couldn't be further from Husserl's. Indeed, the opening lines of Dewey's Experience and Nature explicitly identify naturalism as his preferred method: "The title of this volume, Experience and Nature, is intended to signify that the philosophy here presented may be termed either empirical naturalism or naturalistic empiricism, or taking 'experience' in its usual signification, naturalistic humanism" (Dewey 1958, 1). But we are already in uncharted waters with Dewey's melding of the concepts of 'experience' and 'nature' in his title and 'humanism' and 'naturalism' in his text - relationships which are typically not evoked in discussions of naturalism. The lines immediately following the above passage evince an affinity between Husserl's and Dewey's respective philosophical projects: "To many the associating of the two words [experience and nature] will seem like talking of a round square, so engrained is the notion of the separation of man and experience from nature" (ibid.). Dewey here alludes to philosophies which maintain that human experience is so unique that it is cut off from nature and that nature is thoroughly subordinate to human experience. However, he is equally suspicious of philosophies which conceive of experience as a purely natural phenomenon in the sense that it is mechanistic and determined and thus gives way to a reduction of experience, against which we saw Husserl arguing above. Dewey continues, "According to an opposite school, experience fares as badly, nature being thought to signify something wholly material and TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM 27 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 mechanistic; to frame a theory of experience in naturalistic terms is, accordingly, to degrade and deny the noble and ideal values that characterize experience" (ibid.). Contrary to these views which oppose experience to nature, Dewey seeks to articulate a form of naturalism according to which experience and nature are irreducible yet inextricably intertwined. This basic position, which seems to guide much of Dewey's thought, suggests a strong but complex bond between his own naturalism and Husserl's phenomenology. Dewey's primary concern is to develop a philosophy capable of offering solutions to real problems encountered in ordinary or "primary" experience. He spills much ink arguing against philosophical predecessors whom he credits with creating a chasm between philosophy and the concerns of everyday life. Philosophy, Dewey thinks, has been led astray by various idealisms and supernaturalisms: "Not tested by being employed to see what it leads to in ordinary experience and what new meanings it contributes, this subject-matter becomes arbitrary, aloof..." (Dewey 1958, 6). Philosophy's neglect of experience is that "which accounts for the revulsion of many cultivated persons from any form of philosophy" (ibid.). Philosophy must reorient itself vis-àvis the concerns of ordinary life if it is to have any relevance for the aims of humanity. Dewey shares this conviction with Husserl, who remarks, "In our philosophizing, then - how can we avoid it? - we are functionaries of mankind" (Husserl 1970, 17). But unlike Husserl's attempt to return science and philosophy to the concerns of ordinary experience, Dewey's passes directly through naturalism. Dewey's enthusiasm for Darwinian evolutionary theory has much to do with his desire to put the concerns of philosophy back in touch with the concerns of quotidian experience. The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species generated a radical shift in our conception of nature. The account developed in that work overturned centuries of established belief that a "species" designated stable and unchanging traits of a group of organisms. Applied to nature more broadly, these older ideas held GREGORY A. TROTTER 28 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 that nature is a kind of teleological development, that nature is engaged in an unwavering progression toward a single, ultimate end. However, given the apparent flux and instability of nature, "there are but two alternative courses" if we are to explain nature as it is in itself (Dewey 1997, 6). As Dewey notes, "We must either find the appropriate objects and organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions of changing things; or else, to escape the infection of change, we must seek them in some transcendent and supernal region" (ibid., 6-7). Unfortunately, a glance through the history of philosophical thought suggests that the latter is the preferred option. According to Dewey, Darwin offers us a way out. He writes approvingly, "Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the 'Origin of Species'" (ibid., 19). By showing that "all organic adaptations are due simply to constant variation and the elimination of those variations which are harmful in the struggle for existence," Darwin ended the search for a transcendent guiding principle to be applied to the natural world. He showed that rather than owing its development to a divine creator or teleological organization, nature generates itself out of itself. The changes that we observe in the natural world are due to nothing else than the interaction of natural organisms with other natural organisms. Dewey thus credits Darwin with taking our heads out of the clouds, so to speak, and returning them to the world we see before us. The return to primary experience initiated by the Darwinian revolution raises a question about the status of the knowing subject. What precisely is the relation between the subject and its object, that is, the natural world? Dewey's answer to this question reveals the unique character of his brand of naturalism and his profound disagreement with philosophies that separate subject from object, experience from nature. Here, Dewey articulates the visions of nature to which he is opposed: TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM 29 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 Experience, they say, is important for those beings who have it, but is too casual and sporadic in its occurrence to carry with it any important implications regarding the nature of Nature. Nature, on the other hand, is said to be complete apart from experience. Indeed, according to some thinkers the case is even in worse plight: Experience to them is not only something extraneous which is occasionally superimposed upon nature, but it forms a veil or screen which shuts us off from nature, unless in some way it can be 'transcended.' So something non-natural by way of reason or intuition is introduced, something supra-empirical. According to an opposite school experience fares as badly, nature being thought to signify something wholly material and mechanistic; to frame a theory of experience in naturalistic terms is, accordingly, to degrade and deny the noble and ideal values that characterize experience. (Dewey 1958, 1) On the former view, experience is a non-natural object and is therefore cut off from nature. On the latter view, naturalizing experience amounts to reducing it to a mechanical and determined operation and requires that we ignore the richness and complexity of experience. In both cases, experience is opposed to nature. Dewey's project, then, is to relocate experience within nature without thereby reducing it to merely material processes. The idea of an intimate correlation between experience and nature is integral to Dewey's thought. In the 1929 Gifford Lectures, published as The Quest for Certainty, he can be seen elaborating further upon the points made four years earlier in the Carus lectures that comprised Experience and Nature. Dewey notes that "all of the rivalries and connected problems" of epistemology "grow from a single root," namely, "the assumption that the true and valid object of knowledge is that which has being prior to and independent of the operation of knowing. They spring GREGORY A. TROTTER 30 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 from the doctrine that knowledge is a grasp or beholding of reality without anything being done to modify its antecedent state-the doctrine which is the source of the separation of knowledge from practical activity" (Dewey 1929, 196). For him, the object of knowledge only exists as such insofar as it is part of an operation of knowledge, insofar as it is an object of experience. Or, to put it in Husserlian parlance, the phenomenon has being only insofar as it appears. Dewey goes on to remark, "If we see that knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a participator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object of knowledge resides in the consequences of directed action" (ibid., 196). In other words, the world is disclosed precisely through the conscious activity of a knowing, thinking subject. There is a reciprocal relation between experience and nature. As he puts it, "[E]xperience presents itself as the method, and the only method, for getting at nature, penetrating its secrets, and wherein nature empirically disclosed deepens, enriches and directs the further development of experience" (Dewey 1958, 2). We can now begin to trace some significant connections between Husserl and Dewey. The affirmation of a correlation between subject and object constitutes perhaps the strongest link between them. For both philosophers, subject cannot be fundamentally separated from object. Rather, the two are inextricably related. Neither pole exists in isolation from the other. This fundamental agreement, I think, is precisely what accounts for the significant overlap in their philosophical programs. Indeed, it seems to be the very motor that drives their thought. The operative principle in phenomenology is that consciousness is always consciousness of something and objects are always objects for consciousness. This principle expresses the phenomenological concept of intentionality, and it also reflects a Deweyan sentiment, namely, that the knowing subject is immersed in the world and is always in an intentional or experiential relation with it. It is on the basis of the discovery of this correlation that Husserl proclaims that we are simultaneously "objects . . . in the . . . world" and "subjects for the world" (Husserl 1970, 104-05). Dewey directly TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM 31 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 echoes this claim when he remarks that "experience is of as well as in nature" (Dewey 1958, 4). This principle thus reflects both Husserl's and Dewey's fundamental conviction that the essence of both philosophy and science is constituted within the domain of experience. This crucial idea, I claim, accounts for many of Husserl's and Dewey's shared conclusions, the most significant of which is that every conscious, experiencing subject experiences the same world as everyone else. There are, of course, different attitudes and perspectives one can take on the world, but the context of each attitude is that one's consciousness is correlated to the very same world of experience. This idea, I think, is the key to understanding both Husserl's and Dewey's thought.4 It is on the basis of this notion that Husserl's genealogical inquiry discussed above is made possible. His historical inquiry into the origins of geometry is possible only insofar as the experience or consciousness of Galileo can be said to have been grounded in the very same world (though, of course, at a different stage of development) in which we are currently immersed. We can inquire into the original accomplishment of the first geometers because their science was developed from the ground of the world in which we find ourselves. We can rest on the original accomplishment of geometry precisely because that accomplishment constitutes a layer in the theoretical and practical development of our understanding of the world. If there is a universal correlation between subject and object, if the geometer inhabits the same world as the mechanic, then it is equally true that the scientist, the philosopher, and the layman all share the same world of experience. This claim forms the crux of both Husserl's and Dewey's entire projects. Accepting this point is crucial for putting the claims of science and philosophy back in touch with the world of everyday experience. Dewey captures this idea perfectly when he notes that "experienced material is the same for the scientific man and the man in the street. The latter cannot follow the intervening reasoning without special preparation. But stars, rocks, trees, and creeping things are the same material of GREGORY A. TROTTER 32 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 experience for both" (Dewey 1958, 2). This is precisely the point of Husserl's entire project in the Crisis, namely, to show that science is a human accomplishment developed out of the prescientific ground of the life-world of everyday experience. Only when we realize this will our scientific and philosophical projects reach their true potential, only then will science and philosophy "render our ordinary life-experiences . . . more significant, more luminous . . . and make our dealings with them more fruitful" (ibid., 7). Putting our theoretical inquiries back in touch with experience allows us to once again ask the proper questions, "questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence" (Husserl 1970, 6). CONCLUSION: HUSSERL, DEWEY, AND THE FATE OF NATURALISM At this point, the remarkable degree of agreement between Husserl's and Dewey's philosophical projects should be clear. But what are we to make of the status of naturalism in view of Dewey's reappraisal of what naturalism can and should be? The basic point behind Dewey's particular brand of naturalism is that we should not conceive of ourselves as beings cut off from nature. On the one hand, various forms of idealism and supernaturalism have long maintained that human thought and experience exist over and above the natural world. The latter is thus rendered unimportant. On the other hand, reductive forms of naturalism have led to a similar cleavage between the natural world and human experience, with experience then becoming the victim of purported insignificance. Both of these opposed poles leave no room for reconciliation between experience and nature. But as Dewey shows, the natural world is precisely where the social, political, and theoretical problems that are most pressing originate. A proper response to these questions demands a philosophical reintegration of experience and nature. The attempt to bring philosophical concerns back within the frame of experience is a project in which, as we have seen, Husserl is engaged as well. However, his philosophy is often seen as TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM 33 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 hostile to naturalism in whatever form it may take. This apparent hostility strengthens charges of idealism following Husserl's "transcendental turn." However, Dewey offers a naturalistic framework which does not require that we give up the idea that experience is a crucial piece of the meaning-making process. Indeed, in a Deweyan naturalistic framework, there is no meaning to be generated without the interaction of the knowing subject and objects of experience. Taking the insight from phenomenology that consciousness is always consciousness of some object and merging it with Dewey's insight that maintaining this position does not require that we ascribe some extraor super-natural status to the mind allows us to be naturalists without thereby dismissing the necessary and inextricable contributions of the meaning-making subject. Husserl and Dewey both recognize the importance of the experiencing subject in the process of knowledge, and both recognize that attempts to isolate subjectivity from its position within experience are misguided. By integrating a Deweyan-style naturalistic humanism into this basic position, we can bolster this claim and, at the same time, take seriously the findings of the natural sciences and what they reveal about what kinds of creatures we are. Marquette University gregory.trotter@marquette.edu REFERENCES Dewey, John. 1929. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. New York: Minton, Balch, & Company. ---. 1958. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover Publications. First published 1925. ---. 1997. The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Prometheus Books. First published 1910. GREGORY A. TROTTER 34 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Kestenbaum, Victor. 1977. The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press. Moran, Dermot. 2008. "Husserl's Transcendental Philosophy and the Critique of Naturalism." Continental Philosophy Review 41, no. 4: 401-425. ---. 2013. "Let's Look at It Objectively': Why Phenomenology Cannot Be Naturalized." Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72: 89-115. Pennock, Robert T. 1999. Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stroud, Barry. 2004. "The Charm of Naturalism." In Naturalism in Question, edited by Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, 2135. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. NOTES 1. To be sure, Husserl also acknowledges a crisis within philosophy. Indeed, he cites the failures of philosophy as the reason for the crisis of the positive sciences: "Thus, the crisis of philosophy implies the crisis of all modern sciences as members of the philosophical universe: at first a latent, then a more and more prominent crisis of European humanity itself in respect to the total meaningfulness of its cultural life, its total 'Existenz'" (Husserl 1970, 5-6). 2. As Robert Pennock has argued, methodological naturalism need not make any ontological commitments. Methodological naturalism states only that, for the purposes of scientific inquiry, non-natural entities do not exist. In this sense, naturalism is a methodological assumption rather than an ontological claim, a heuristic device for problem-solving which guides scientific inquiry (Pennock, 1999). 3. "The Origin of Geometry" is an excellent distillation of many of the themes in the Crisis. It is used frequently to talk about what Husserl is up to in the Crisis because it is such a concise example of his entire TOWARD A NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM 35 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016 project in that work. Husserl says of his localized reflections on geometry what can be said about his entire argument throughout the Crisis: "Our considerations will necessarily lead to the deepest problems of meaning, problems of science and of the history of science in general, and indeed in the end to problems of a universal history in general" (Husserl 1970, 353). This short essay has been tremendously influential. Indeed, Jacques Derrida's first major published work was a long, critical introduction to "The Origin of Geometry" and can be read as a kind of "jumping off" point for Derrida's later work on writing and speech. 4. In a footnote within the Crisis, Husserl confesses that this insight about the a priori correlation between subject and object, consciousness and world is the one which guides all of his work: "The first breakthrough of this universal a priori of correlation between experienced object and manners of givenness...affected me so deeply that my whole subsequent life-work has been dominated by the task of systematically elaborating on this a priori of correlation" (Husserl 1970, 166).