The naturalism debate and the development of European philosophy

Philosophy Today

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 102-111

  Pihlström, Sami ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33847319962     PISSN: 00318256     EISSN: 00318256     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday200246158     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. See Sami Pihlström, "Investigating the Transcendental Tradition," Philosophy Today 44 (2000): 426-41
2. Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2000) (hereafter cited as PW)
3. Cf. Richard Shusterman, "The Perils of Making Philosophy a Lingua Americana," The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 11, 2000. Shusterman argues that Europeans are more interested in American philosophy than vice versa
4. There are also some other highly relevant recent contributions by European philosophers worth mentioning: see, e.g., Geert Keil and Herbert Schnädelbach, eds., Naturalismus: Philosophische Beiträge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000)
5. as well as Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophie in der modernen Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000)
6. Cf. also Michael Friedman, "Philosophical Naturalism," Proceedings and Addresses of the APA 71:2 (1997): 7-21
7. W. V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth, revised ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1st. ed. 1990]), p. 21
8. Cf. here the critique of naturalists' self-understanding by Jacob Bösenberg ("Comment on D. Parisi's 'The Naturalization of Humans'" [NCP, pp. 89-92)
9. This basic critique of reductive naturalism is, I think, also familiar from the works of some leading North-American philosophers: see Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. by James Conant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994)
10. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)
11. as well as, more recently, Frederick A. Olaf son, Naturalism and the Human Condition: Against Scientism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
12. For the distinction between naturalism and culturalism in philosophical anthropology, see Sami Pihlström, "On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology," forthcoming in Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003)
13. It should be noted that Friedman's discussion of the clash between Carnap and Heidegger also focuses on these thinkers' diverging political orientations. In addition to PW, see Michael Friedman, "Overcoming Metaphysics: Carnap and Heidegger", in Ronald Giere and Alan Richardson, eds., Origins of Logical Empiricism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 45-79
14. See also Koppelberg, "Was ist Naturalismus in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie?" in Keil and Schnädelbach, eds., Naturalismus, pp. 68-91
15. The phrase "second nature" is used in this way by John McDowell in his much-discussed work, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2nd. ed., 1996 [1st. ed. 1994])
16. For a critical but sympathetic evaluation of McDowell's softly naturalistic project, see Sami Pihlström, "How Minds Understand Their World: Remarks on John McDowell's Naturalism, Kantianism, and Pragmatism," Facta Philosophica 1 (1999): 227-43
17. See Sami Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology: Understanding Our Human Life in a Human World (New York: Peter Lang, 1998)
18. John Dewey, Experience and Nature [1925, 2nd. ed. 1929], in Later Works, vol. 1, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), p. 350
19. See Joseph S. Catalano, Thinking Matter: Consciousness from Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
20. Samuel Todes, Body and World (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001)
21. For a more detailed exposition of the neo-Kantian character of Carnap's Aufbau program, see Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
22. cf. also Alan Richardson, Carnap's Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
23. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, §177; also quoted by Friedman in PW, p. 75
24. Friedman, "Philosophical Naturalism," p. 13
25. On this aspect of Dewey's thought, early and late, see John R. Shook, Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000)
26. Cf., e.g., Achim Stephan, Emergent: Von der Unvorhersagbarkeit zur Selbstorganisation (Dresden and München: Dresden University Press, 1999)
27. see also Stephan, "Reductionism and Naturalization" (NCP, pp. 131-43)
28. For a detailed critical discussion of the recent debate on emergence, see Sami Pihlström, "The Re-Emergence of the Emergence Debate," forthcoming in Principia (2002)
29. I have attempted a more general reassessment of the naturalism discussion in several other essays: see, e.g., Sami Pihlström, "Naturalism, Transcendental Conditions, and the Self-Discipline of Philosophical Reason," forthcoming in Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15 (2001); and "On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology."