![]() ![]() When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our world, we are not thinking of the world in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. We exist as "being-in-the-world," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. By "world" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being ( Being in Time, Part One: II-III). The concept also plays a significant role in Matthew Ratcliffe's contribution, which argues in an original way that the intelligibility of science presupposes the life-world, yet scientific naturalism remains oblivious to the life-world's existential and epistemological primacy.Īnother way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "world" (Heidegger 1962). Moran explains the phenomenological concept of the life-world as Husserl presented it. Husserl (1970) also argues that scientific naturalism presupposes and overlooks the "life-world" as a transcendental structure of intersubjective understanding, without which science would not be possible. For example, as Zahavi and Dermot Moran explain, Husserl argues that naturalistic treatments of consciousness as a biological or psychological property of certain organisms overlook and cannot account for the transcendental standing of consciousness as a necessary condition of possibility for any entity to appear in whatever way it does and with whatever meaning it has. Phenomenologists generally argue that naturalism overlooks and cannot account for the necessary conditions of its own possibility. Phenomenology, understood as transcendental philosophy (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), fundamental ontology (Heidegger), or existential analysis (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), stands opposed to scientific naturalism, especially its methodological component. But it is not always natural science that speaks when natural scientists are speaking and it assuredly is not when they are talking about 'philosophy of Nature' and 'epistemology as a natural science.' (Husserl 1982, p. When it is actually natural science that speaks, we listen gladly and as disciples. Dan Zahavi quotes Husserl to make this point: Moreover, when a scientist gives voice to scientific naturalism, she or he no longer speaks just as a scientist. ![]() Although some scientists may espouse scientific naturalism, it is not built into the actual practice of empirical science. ![]() Scientific naturalism is a philosophical thesis, not a thesis belonging to any of the empirical sciences themselves. The methodological component is the thesis that the methods of empirical science give science a general and final authority about the world, and therefore science should be epistemically privileged over all other forms of investigation. The ontological component is physicalism, the thesis that everything that exists, including the mind, is completely physical. The view has an ontological component and a methodological component (Papineau 2009). "Scientific naturalism" can be defined as the view that science provides the best account of reality. It will be useful to have in hand a forceful form of naturalism. Instead, my focus will be on those essays that examine the relationship between naturalism and phenomenology in its broadly Husserlian and Heideggerian senses. Given the heterogeneity of the essays, it will not be possible to discuss them all here. "Naturalism," too, is understood in a variety of ways. Although the editors state in their introduction that "phenomenology," as understood in the volume, refers to the style and method of doing philosophy that originated with Edmund Husserl and was carried forward in different ways by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, three of the fourteen essays (by James Lenman, Alison Assiter, and Iain Hamilton Grant, respectively) make little or no mention of phenomenology defined in this way, though they do concern various ontological and ethical issues about the relationship between human experience and the natural world. This somewhat disparate collection concerns the difficult relationship between phenomenology and naturalism. ![]()
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