MODERN AND POSTMODERN DRAMA

Naturalism in Question, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004

American Philosophical Association, 2021

I am grateful to the APA Committee on Prizes and Lectures for offering me the Romanell prize. I confess to having been quite surprised as I don't see myself as actively participating in debates about naturalism in philosophy. And yet …. I have said about my approach in epistemology and philosophy of science that is naturalist (in a sense that means something to me). So I saw and see the prize not as an acknowledgement of any contribution I have made to the philosophical discussion of naturalism, but a challenge to make good on this selfassessment. I approach the task with gratitude tinged with some wariness. What could naturalism in philosophy be? And, is there a form of naturalism that I could claim as also mine? My talk today will be divided into three parts. The first addresses that first question: what could naturalism in philosophy be? The second reflects skeptically on the prospects for one common understanding of naturalism in philosophy: that science be the source of answers to philosophical questions. The third proposes a naturalism without science. Part One: Naturalism as Opposed to What? To answer this question, I consulted both philosophical and lexicographical sources. Both the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on "Naturalism" 1 and that on "Naturalism in

De Caro, M. & Macarthur, D. (eds.), The Handbook of Liberal Naturalism. London: Routledge., 2022

In this paper I shall consider the relationship between naturalism and aesthetics. In order to address this question I want to critically discuss Murray Smith’s book "Film, Art and the Third Culture" (2017) because it has the virtue of putting this question at the centre of its account of the aesthetics of film. I shall argue for two main ideas: firstly, that earning the label “non-reductive” in the setting of a scientific naturalism is a lot more problematic than Smith supposes and once one sees the difficulties that arise then the possibility of a non-scientific or liberal naturalism becomes attractive; and, secondly, whereas Smith thinks the way to thicken explanations in (film) aesthetics is to go sub-personal by invoking sub-personal neural mechanisms in the explanation of aesthetic phenomena, I suggest that such a move is optional and, in any case, philosophically problematic.

P. Giladi (ed.) 'Responses to Naturalism: Critical Perspectives from Idealism and Pragmatism'. New York: Routledge , 2019

Philo, 2009

i develop the conjecture that "naturalism" in philosophy names not a thesis but a paradigm in something like thomas Kuhn's sense, i.e., a set of commitments, shared by a group of investigators, whose acceptance by the members of the group powerfully influences their day-today investigative practice. i take a stab at spelling out the shared commitments that make up naturalism, and the logical and evidential relations among them. i used to think it was pretty much a waste of time to try to sort out philosophical talk of naturalism. i couldn't really discern a single, univocal formulation of naturalism, and i saw no particular reason to expect one to exist. Moreover, none of this seemed to matter. though sympathetic to the philosophical temperament of self-professed naturalists, i found that i could express all the philosophical theses i really cared about without using "naturalism" or any of its cognates; and, in the arguments of self-professed naturalists, little or nothing of philosophical importance ever seemed to turn on the precise formulation of naturalism. i suspected that talk of naturalism in philosophical discourse was playing a purely rhetorical role. i have since changed my mind. My mistake, as i'm now inclined to see it, was to assume that (i) professions of naturalism are merely, or mainly, expressions of commitment to a th e sis, indeed to a sin g le thesis, and that (ii) clarification of naturalism would require c o n c e p tual an alysis. But there are attractive alternatives to these assumptions. We can suppose in their place that (i') professions of naturalism are (usually) expressions of allegiance to something like a philosophical p arad ig m in thomas Kuhn's sense of "paradigm", something therefore m ultid im e n sio n al, and that (ii') proposed elucidations of this paradigm are therefore e m p iric al h yp o th e se s in the psychology and sociology of philosophy. let me flesh this out a little.