Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? This question often serves as a debating tactic used by theists to attack naturalism. Many people apparently regard the question—couched in such stark, general terms—as too profound for natural science to answer. It is unanswerable by science, I argue, not because it’s profound or because science is superficial but because the question, as it s...

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...

I discuss motivations for methodological naturalism in science. I argue that methodological naturalism neither needs nor supports metaphysical naturalism. We are the beneficiaries of many generations’ efforts to unlock the mysteries of nature. The best scientific theories of today have achieved unparalleled predictive success, and this success provides some evidence that these theories have lat...

In this article I dispute the claim, made by several contemporary scholars, that Spinoza was a naturalist. ‘Naturalism’ here refers to two distinct but related positions in contemporary philosophy. The first, ontological naturalism, is the view that everything that exists possesses a certain character (variously defined) permitting it to be defined as natural and prohibiting it from being defin...

Neven Sesardic has recently defended his arguments in favour of racial naturalism-the view that race is a valid biological category-in response to my criticism of his work. While Sesardic claims that a strong version of racial naturalism can survive critique, he has in fact weakened his position considerably. He concedes that conventional racial taxonomy is arbitrary and he no longer identifies...

Hume is a naturalist in many different respects and about many different topics; this paper argues that he is also a naturalist about intentionality and representation. It does so in the course of answering four questions about his theory of mental representation: (1) Which perceptions represent? (2) What can perceptions represent? (3) Why do perceptions represent at all? (4) How do perceptions...

(September 7, 2012) I have argued that the Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions promotes a naturalistic study of science. The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge is also seen by many of its proponents as a naturalistic approach to science, and as such may be seen as part of the Kuhnian legacy. Nonetheless, I argue that it has been an inadequate successor to Kuhn. In particular, its emp...