Harmless Naturalism: The Limits of Science and the Nature of Philosophy

By Robert F. Almeder

Book Overview

Does science have all the answers? The view that it does is known as scientific naturalism or scientism, and is now commonly advanced under the label 'naturalized epistemology'. Scientism holds that the only legitimate claims about the world are those that can be tested by the methods of the natural sciences. Robert Almeder argues that scientism is rationally indefensible, but that there is a rationally defensible form of naturalism - 'harmless naturalism' - which does not reduce philosophical explanations to scientific ones. This book begins by refuting the arguments for the most radical form of scientism, the Replacement Thesis, which derives from Quine. Almeder goes on to refute the Transformational Thesis, an allegedly distinct form of naturalized epistemology offered by Alvin Goldman and others. Finally, there is an examination of 'harmless naturalism', a position which holds that there are some questions about the world whose answers are not to be sought in natural science.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812693795
• ISBN13: 9780812693799
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Open Court
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

moving cautiously beyond scientism...

I will quote from the Introduction (page 3): "Let me first briefly state this book's argument in a very general way. Scientism, as described in either of the two forms just noted, is rationally indefensible, and yet there is a defensible form of naturalism that does not directly or indirectly reduce philosophical explanations to scientific explanations--although philosophical explanations are implicitly empirically testable and hence confirmable or fasifiable. In short, I will defend a reasonably comprehensive naturalism while avoiding both scientism and the reduction of philosophical claims and explanations to stricly scientific claims and explanations. In so doing, I also hope to define philosophy by showing how a good philsophical explananation, while empirically testable, differs from a good scientfic explanation."