ABSTRACT
It is no easy matter to define philosophical naturalism, but I am going to take it in a very simple and straightforward way. I shall understand naturalism as the view that the problems of philosophy are to be addressed, and their solutions framed, in terms acceptable to natural science, particularly physical science. Naturalism has both a negative and a positive thrust. The negative part is that to the extent the concepts philosophers employ have no home in the language of physics – if they are irreducibly mentalistic, say, or value laden, or peculiarly religious – those concepts have no bearing on the world of ordinary experience, which (it is implied) is the only world of which we have knowledge. Right-thinking philosophers will therefore eschew them. The positive thesis is that the concepts of the physical sciences will be found to suffice: that is, that they can and ultimately will provide a thorough and sufficient understanding of all that we experience. I think it is fair to say that naturalism represents a kind of orthodoxy within analytic philosophy. But its origins are much older, and like most orthodoxies it has seldom come close to achieving universal acceptance. One thing that impedes its success is the free will problem, which has always resisted solution in terms congenial to naturalism, and continues to do so. The reason is essentially twofold: friends of naturalism have never succeeded in providing a deterministic solution to the problem, and an indeterministic or libertarian solution violates the tenets of naturalism. In this paper, I shall chart the case for these claims, and then say just a bit about what they imply about the prospects for analytical philosophy without naturalism.
