Introduction

Liberal Naturalism is a recent arrival in the history of philosophical naturalisms, a tradition which extends at least as far back as the Ionian School, and which includes the naturalisms of Aristotle, Spinoza, Hume, Dewey and Quine. The philosophical outlook of liberal naturalism is at once nonscientistic and anti-supernatural. The manifest image is also characterisable as the nonsupernatural nonscientific realm – in the sense that the objects of the manifest image are encounterable nonsupernatural things and, at the same time, not mere posits of scientific theory; nor exhaustively explicable in scientific terms. Liberal naturalism makes room in its vision of the world for nonscientific realities and nonscientific knowledge or understanding. Philosophers in the scientific age people are currently living in have been so focused on the sciences, particularly the natural sciences, and how philosophy relates to them, that they have overlooked the world under their own noses.