Dear all, On Thursday (the 23rd) Alexis Papazoglou will be speaking at the Serious Metaphysics Group, on 'Naturalism and the Quest for Unity'. We'll meet at the regular time of 1:00 - 2:30pm, in the Faculty Board Room. An abstract is included below.
Hope to see you there, Georgie Abstract Naturalism, perhaps the main ideology of contemporary analytic philosophy, can be shown to have many different historical origins. In this paper I focus on the way that contemporary naturalism relates to the naturalism developed by American philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century. What I will argue is that the chief motivation of those American naturalists was a desire for unity and the overcoming of dualisms. Naturalism was to achieve this unity through understanding all of reality as intelligible in the same way: intelligible as nature. This claim, in turn, was understood through the idea that all of nature (all of reality) could become intelligible by applying the same method of inquiry, that of the natural sciences. This underlying motive for offering a unified account of reality can be traced in both contemporary strands of naturalism: scientific and liberal. However, as I will aim to show in this paper, both scientific naturalism and liberal naturalism fail to live up to their implicit promise of a unified account of reality as nature. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
