ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between classical pragmatism and liberal naturalism. Evolutionary theory, in contrast, gives people a single-level picture of nature in which nothing timeless is seen as standing behind its manifest changes. Nature is no longer understood as economical, symmetrical, orderly and benevolent, but as mutable, contingent, wasteful and overproductive. The tender-minded, who wish to maintain the importance of moral value, freedom and the transcendent, recoil from this conclusion, feeling that these items can find no place in a materialistic universe. Experience for Dewey is not what it was for the classical empiricists, namely, “a name for the ensemble of Cartesian cogitationes, Lockean ideas”. Methodological scientific naturalism is directly concerned not with what there is, but with the methods by which people gain knowledge of what there is.
