On pitfalls of naturalism

Heidegger on Science and Naturalism

Joseph Rouse Wesleyan University Heidegger’s reputation in the Anglophone philosophical world suggests that he was unsympathetic to the natural sciences, and generally unconcerned with the philosophy of science. Even among those who know his work, philosophy of science is not usually considered central to Heidegger, nor is he seen as a significant contributor to philosophy of science. This diss...

Two Notions of Naturalism∗

What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjoint, and science takes the lead where the two overlap. At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different enterprise from science...

Cultural Naturalism

Culture can be viewed as the means by which a society can live in its surroundings by acquiring and consuming free energy. This naturalistic notion assumes that everything can be valued in terms of energy, hence also social changes can be described as natural processes that are influenced by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This universal law, when formulated as an equation of motion, reveals tha...

Positivism, Naturalism, and Anti- Naturalism in the Social Sciences

Dewey on Naturalism, Realism and Science