Naturalism is the dominant philosophical stance in North American philosophy today. Many philosophers explicitly identify themselves as naturalists, whose philosophical work is closely aligned with the natural sciences. Yet the best evidence for the dominance of naturalism comes from those philosophers who profess to be its opponents. These critics often make very significant concessions to nat...

Quayshawn Spencer (2014) misunderstands my treatment of racial naturalism. I argued that racial naturalism must entail a strong claim, such as "races are subspecies", if it is to be a substantive position that contrasts with anti-realism about biological race. My recognition that not all race naturalists make such a strong claim is evident throughout the article Spencer reviews (Hochman, 2013a)...

In discussions on naturalism vs. stylization in the design of virtual pedagogical agents (VPAs), the smooth communication argument is one of the most central in favour of visual naturalism. Yet, this argument dissolves if we separate design into the levels of: (l) linguistic performance, where the support for naturalism is strong; (2) dynamic visual appearance, in the sense of bodily behaviour,...

Abstract Neo-Aristotelian naturalism purports to explain morality in terms of human nature, while maintaining that the relevant aspects nature cannot be known scientifically. This has led some conclude neo-Aristotelian is not a form ethical standard, metaphysical sense. In this paper, I argue fact standard committed about moral truths and presents distinctive underappreciated argument for it. r...

1. The relevance of science to philosophy What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjoint, and science takes the lead where the two overlap. At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not ...

What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjoint, and science takes the lead where the two overlap. At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different enterprise from science...

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that 'race' is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genet...

Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in physics. These disagreements do notmuch affect the ordinary practice of sciencewhich is about small subsystems of the universe, described or explained against a ba...

The current mantra regarding scientific naturalism about natural kinds has centered on the methodological and axiological successes of acquiring knowledge using the resources found in the natural sciences. The methodological components of scientific naturalism are primarily concerned with how to conduct inquiry, along with how certain rules function within systems of knowledge. Note, however, t...