Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective

Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective
Author: Lynne Rudder Baker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199914737

Science and its philosophical companion, Naturalism, represent reality in wholly nonpersonal terms. How, if at all, can a nonpersonal scheme accommodate the first-person perspective that we all enjoy? In this volume, Lynne Rudder Baker explores that question by considering both reductive and eliminative approaches to the first-person perspective. After finding both approaches wanting, she mounts an original constructive argument to show that a non-Cartesian first-person perspective belongs in the basic inventory of what exists. That is, the world that contains us persons is irreducibly personal. After arguing for the irreducibilty and ineliminability of the first-person perspective, Baker develops a theory of this perspective. The first-person perspective has two stages, rudimentary and robust. Human infants and nonhuman animals with consciousness and intentionality have rudimentary first-person perspectives. In learning a language, a person acquires a robust first-person perspective: the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself, in the first person. By developing an account of personal identity, Baker argues that her theory is coherent, and she shows various ways in which first-person perspectives contribute to reality.

Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective

Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective
Author: Lynne Rudder Baker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2013-04-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0199914745

This book investigates the limits of scientific naturalism. It has three goals: (1) to show that no wholly impersonal account of reality can be adequate to all phenomena; (2) to formulate a nonCartesian account of the first-person perspective; (3) to develop a 'near-naturalism' that accommodates the world of our encounters and interactions.

How Successful is Naturalism?

How Successful is Naturalism?
Author: Georg Gasser
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 311032895X

Naturalism is the reigning creed in analytic philosophy. Naturalists claim that natural science provides a complete account of all forms of existence. According to the naturalistic credo there are no aspects of human existence which transcend methods and explanations of science. Our concepts of the self, the mind, subjectivity, human freedom or responsibility is to be defined in terms of established sciences. The aim of the present volume is to draw the balance of naturalism’s success so far. Unlike other volumes it does not contain a collection of papers which unanimously reject naturalism. Naturalists and anti-naturalists alike unfold their positions discussing the success or failure of naturalistic approaches. "How successful is naturalism? shows where the lines of agreement and disagreement between naturalists and their critics are to be located in contemporary philosophical discussion. With contributions of Rudder Lynne Baker, Johannes Brandl, Helmut Fink, Ulrich Frey, Georg Gasser & Matthias Stefan, Peter S.M. Hacker, Winfried Löffler, Nancey Murphy, Josef Quitterer, Michael Rea, Thomas Sukopp, Konrad Talmont-Kaminski and Gerd Vollmer.

Naturalism, Human Flourishing, and Asian Philosophy

Naturalism, Human Flourishing, and Asian Philosophy
Author: Taylor & Francis Group
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9781032177298

This book provides a rigorous analysis of Owen Flanagan's comparative philosophy. The contributors discuss his philosophy of human flourishing and naturalized approach to Asian Philosophy. The essays critically analyse Flanagan's naturalized eudaimonics, naturalized Buddhism, and theory of Confucian human flourishing and moral modularity.

Common Sense Metaphysics

Common Sense Metaphysics
Author: Luis R.G. Oliveira
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2020-12-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000330567

This book celebrates the research career of Lynne Rudder Baker by presenting sixteen new and critical essays from admiring students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends. Baker was a trenchant critic of physicalist conceptions of the universe. She was a staunch defender of a kind of practical realism, what she sometimes called a metaphysics of everyday life. It was this general “common sense” philosophical outlook that underwrote her famous constitution view of reality. Whereas most of her contemporaries were in general given to metaphysical reductionism and eliminativism, Baker was unapologetic and philosophically deft in her defense of ontological pluralism. The essays in this book engage with all aspects of her unique and influential work: practical realism about the mind; the constitution view of human persons; the first-person perspective; and God, Christianity, and naturalism. Common Sense Metaphysics will be of interest to scholars of Baker’s work, as well as scholars and advanced students engaged in research on various topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion.

The Image in Mind

The Image in Mind
Author: Charles Taliaferro
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2013-06-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1441148825

A philosophical inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of theism and naturalism in accounting for the emergence of consciousness, the visual imagination and aesthetic values. The authors begin by offering an account of modern scientific practice which gives a central place to the visual imagination and aesthetic values. They then move to test the explanatory power of naturalism and theism in accounting for consciousness and the very visual imagination and aesthetic values that lie behind and define modern science. Taliaferro and Evans argue that evolutionary biology alone is insufficient to account for consciousness, the visual imagination and aesthetic values. Insofar as naturalism is compelled to go beyond evolutionary biology, it does not fare as well as theism in terms of explanatory power.

Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science

Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science
Author: Jack Reynolds
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2017-09-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317409078

Arguing for the compatibility of phenomenology and naturalism, this book also refashions each. The opening chapters begin with a methodological focus, which seeks to curb the "over-bidding" characteristic of both traditional transcendental phenomenology and scientific naturalism. Having thus opened up the possibility that the twain might meet, it is in the detailed chapters on matters where scientific and phenomenological work overlap and sometimes conflict – on time, body, and others – that the book contests some of the standard ways of understanding the relationship between phenomenological philosophy and empirical science, and between phenomenology and naturalism. Without invoking a methodological move of quarantine, in which each is allocated to their proper and separate domains, the book outlines the significance of the first-person perspective characteristic of phenomenology – both epistemically and ontologically – while according due respect to the relevant empirical sciences. The book thus renews phenomenology and argues for its ongoing relevance and importance for the future of philosophy.

The Self

The Self
Author: Jonardon Ganeri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191631280

What is it to occupy a first-person stance? Is the first-personal idea one has of oneself in conflict with the idea of oneself as a physical being? How, if there is a conflict, is it to be resolved? The Self recommends a new way to approach those questions, finding inspiration in theories about consciousness and mind in first millennial India. These philosophers do not regard the first-person stance as in conflict with the natural—their idea of nature is not that of scientific naturalism, but rather a liberal naturalism non-exclusive of the normative. Jonardon Ganeri explores a wide range of ideas about the self: reflexive self-representation, mental files, and quasi-subject analyses of subjective consciousness; the theory of emergence as transformation; embodiment and the idea of a bodily self; the centrality of the emotions to the unity of self. Buddhism's claim that there is no self too readily assumes an account of what a self must be. Ganeri argues instead that the self is a negotiation between self-presentation and normative avowal, a transaction grounded in unconscious mind. Immersion, participation, and coordination are jointly constitutive of self, the first-person stance at once lived, engaged, and underwritten. And all is in harmony with the idea of the natural.

Second Thoughts and the Epistemological Enterprise

Second Thoughts and the Epistemological Enterprise
Author: Hilary Kornblith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2019-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108498515

Collected essays showing how social psychology illuminates epistemological problems, focusing on issues of self-knowledge and the nature of human reason. The book features specific examples of sceptical problems and also includes two entirely new essays. It will appeal to pyschologists as well philosophers.

Phenomenology and Naturalism

Phenomenology and Naturalism
Author: Rafael Winkler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351764942

At present, ‘naturalism’ is arguably the dominant trend in both Anglo-American and European philosophy. Owing to the influence of the works of W.V.O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Hillary Putnam, among others, naturalism both as a methodological and ontological position has become one of the mainstays of contemporary analytic approaches to knowledge, mind and ethics. From the early 1990s onward, European philosophy in the English-speaking world has been witnessing a turn from the philosophies of the subjects of phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism and a revival of a certain kind of vitalism, whether Bergsonian or Nietzschean, and also of a certain kind of materialism that is close in spirit to Spinoza’s Ethics and to the naturalism and monism of the early Ionian thinkers. This book comprises essays written by experts in both the European and the Anglo-American traditions such as John Sallis, David Papineau, David Cerbone, Dan Zahavi, Paul Patton, Bernhard Weiss, Jack Reynolds and Benedict Smith, who explore the limit of naturalism and the debate between naturalism and phenomenology. This book also considers the relation between Deleuze’s philosophy and naturalism as well as the critique of phenomenology by speculative realism. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.