ABSTRACT
The reasons why philosophers with a this-worldly bent reject idealism are obvious enough. Idealism is typically understood as a philosophical outlook that gives a necessary place to mind in reality, and this seems to suggest traditional theological views like that which sees the material world as a creation of a transcendent mind. Moore’s revolt against the views of the idealists had been expressed in his paper from 1899, “The Nature of Judgement”, but the first fruits of his new philosophical approach to gain a wide readership were those of his 1903 Principia Ethica, at the centre of which was a critique of what he called the “naturalistic fallacy” in ethics. Early in the reception of David Lewis’s work, Prior signalled his resistance to this metaphysics and provided an early instantiation of an ‘actualist’ alternative. In his critique of the object naturalism of contemporary analytic philosophy, Huw Price has revealed the contradictions in the object naturalist’s position.
