Religious naturalism: The current debate

The Reach of the Aesthetic and Religious Naturalism: Peircean and Polanyian Reflections

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

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...

Quining Naturalism

Scientific naturalism is a metaphysical doctrine, a view about what there is, or what we ought to believe that there is. It maintains that natural science should be our guide in matters metaphysical: the ontology we should accept is the ontology that turns out to be required by science. Quine is often regarded as the doyen of scientific naturalists, though the supporting cast includes such gian...

Naturalism and the a Priori

In Coming to Our Senses (1996), I argue for and apply a naturalistic semantic methodology to defend an anti-holistic truth-referential view of meaning. The naturalism in question is an epistemological doctrine that I take from Quine: there is only one way of knowing, the empirical way that is the basis of science (whatever that way may be). So I reject “a priori knowledge.” I do not give a deta...