Nature’s Dark Domain: an Argument for a Naturalized Phenomenology

In what follows, I take naturalism to be a methodological prescription about how philosophical theories should relate to other branches of enquiry. Methodological naturalists urge that philosophical claims should a) be informed and constrained by the best scientific and empirical knowledge and b) should eschew claims about sources of information not so informed or constrained. In a naturalized discipline the arrows of justification and constraint between claims and theories are reciprocal. Theories in a naturalized philosophy of mind, for example, are informed by developments in psychology, neuroscience and AI but also inform research in those areas.