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    Published : 2023-09-27
    Vol. 71 No. 3 (2023)

    Which Naturalism?

    John Cottingham

    https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5205-0323

    Marcin Iwanicki

    https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3904-0291

    Joanna Klara Teske

    https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3651-595X

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rf23713.15

    (trans. Marcin Iwanicki, Joanna Klara Teske)

    Abstract

    The original: ”Which Naturalism?”, New Blackfriars 2022: 1–16, DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1111/nbfr.12765. Translation with the Authors' permission.

    The ‘naturalizing’ agenda in contemporary secularist philosophy is often presented in opposition to traditional theism. But looking at the history of the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ reveals a discontinuity between how these terms are currently understood and how they were understood in the past. The modern ‘naturalist’, in insisting that all phenomena should be brought within the domain of the natural, is advancing a thesis that many classical, medieval and early-modern philosophers and theologians would have regarded as fairly self-evident. What has changed is not that there is a new determination to include within the natural domain what was previously excluded from it, but rather that there is a radical shift in how the natural domain is to be understood. This paper argues that the philosophically interesting question is not whether or not we should be naturalists, but which of two naturalisms we should adopt: secular naturalism, with its neutralist conception of nature in general and of human nature in particular, or theistic naturalism, according to which the natural world and our own nature bear the stamp of the divine. It turns out the former (secularist) view is vulnerable to serious difficulties, on both the epistemic and the moral fronts.

    Keywords:

    nature, scientism, secularism, natural light, theism



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    Roczniki Filozoficzne · ISSN 0035-7685 | eISSN 2450-002X
    © Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL & Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II


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