"Naturalism" in philosophy is often vaguely defined and varies widely in interpretation.

Radical naturalists argue philosophy should be fully continuous with the sciences.

Analytic philosophy’s focus on internal coherence risks letting problematic ideas persist unchallenged.

My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses. There were philosophers who agreed, of course, but the main response was either:

This isn’t even a debate. Philosophy is already scientific.

Philosophy should not be scientific.

The philosopher Liam Kofi Bright, whom I previously responded to in an earlier essay, where I argued that naturalistic philosophy can provide us with the optimistic answer to his pessimism about traditional analytic philosophy, noted that he doesn't even encounter philosophy vs. science debates anymore. But is this debate over meta-philosophy really over?

No doubt, among philosophers of science, this debate may seem largely obsolete (it is not). And Bright’s department, the LSE Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, is one of the most naturalistic ones in existence. Indeed, their very motto calls for the continuity between philosophy and science:

Because of that mission, I applied and received an offer to pursue a Ph.D. at the LSE, but I decided to go to Sydney, where Paul Griffiths and Peter Godfrey-Smith, as radical naturalists, offered what I saw as the best place to write a thesis in naturalist biological philosophy,........

© Psychology Today