You may find the recording of the 2012 Moving Naturalism Forward conference,(starting here), interesting. It should not, however, be treated as representative of naturalism in philosophy (I don't see how that's possible at a conference without at least D. M. Armstrong, or someone of equal caliber).

Last edited by John West (6/26/2015 7:49 am)

iwpoe wrote:

I know what naive pop / scientistic naturalism looks like. I grew up on it.

Lord, those names. Is it cringe-worthy with all the self-assured dismal of religious caricature and non-"scientific" questions I've come to expect from Dawkins and co. or is it interesting?

It's interesting. Parts of it, anyway. I skipped a couple sections. There are a few silly anti-religion one-liners, but for the most part they stay within their respective fields of philosophy and science. Dawkins mostly keeps his mouth shut.

Last edited by John West (6/26/2015 8:03 am)

iwpoe wrote:

Thank god. I can't stand another group of aspie STEM-school rejects speaking as if the reduction of the mind to computation is a trivial matter of vocabulary and morality makes sense in terms of evolutionary theory & determinism.

For example, most of them support some form of compatibilism about free will. It's interesting. But they are still Naturalists (capital N).
 

Thanks very much for the lecture vid Iwpoe - I've been meaning to get Gerson's Analytical account of Plotinus for ages now (his book on the First Cause argument in Classical Philosophy also looks tempting though dreadfully expensive).

iwpoe wrote:

John West wrote:

For example, most of them support some form of compatibilism about free will. It's interesting. But they are still Naturalists (capital N).

Is there any way to maintain the reality of what might be called loosely "platonic objects"- mathimaticals, relations, classes, Forms, Categories, etc -and to do metaphysics proper while still being a Naturalist?

It depends on how strict one wants to be about the use of the term 'Naturalist'. One could make the case that methodologically Quineans inherit Positivism's 'there might be a God, there might be immaterial souls et cetera but Science gives us no reason to assume their existence and thus we need not talk of them'. If one wants to be a hard Metaphysical Naturalist then it becomes more awkward.

Many philosophers of an Agnostic or Naturalist stripe feel compelled to admit Numbers as Platonic entities and a considerable number do the same with properties. The thought is now that if ne has to admit them then at least one should make them do hard explanatory work explaining things like causation, modality, reference and so forth in Philosophy of Science contests. Professional atheist philosophers of religion Tooley and Fales are two of the most influential proponents of this kind of Platonism (in fact quite a few professional atheist philosophers are Platonists). Historically there have been Naturalists e.g. Russell or Nicolai Hartmann who endorsed quite elaborate Platonic ontologies - there was less resistance amongst these earlier thinkers to accepting a non-mechanistic or physicalist approach however.

My thoughts are that someone who wants to eliminate God from his or her ontology and still explain reality is going to have to bring in more and more Platonic entities. The trouble for them is that it makes it increasingly difficult to see anything approaching a physicalist take on philosophy of mind could succeed. After all: Benacerraf's Problem is also Socrate's argument for the immateriality of the soul.
 

I never quite understood how exactly in the end Russell maintained his atheism. If you think "north of" is real why is the Form of the Good troubling?

I myself am open to something like the Hegelianism of Russell's youth, but I'm not sure that can easily get you to anything like the kind of modern scientistic atheism taken for granted now, or if it's even a non-theism.