Wweyer's List: Naturalism & philosophy of science

reviews of Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses - Thomas W. Clark

Supplement to textbook - Becoming a Critical Thinker - A Guide for the New Millennium - (Dr. Robert T. Carroll) Class Philosophy 320 - Logic and Critical Reasoning - Student Information

Ionian Enchantment

A Brief History of Scientific Naturalism

by

Ignacio Prado, Tufts University

June, 2006



I had experienced the Ionian Enchantment. It means a belief in the unity of the sciences—a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of laws.

- E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, pp. 4-5.


The Ancient Greeks - The Middle Ages - The Renaissance and Enlightenment
The Modern Era of Naturalism - Further Readings on Naturalism


Naturalists are above all people who experience, in E.O. Wilson’s phrase, “the Ionian Enchantment”: a sense of wonder in the face of the mathematically elegant, orderly web of natural causation that governs and unifies all phenomena, from particles to galaxies, from genes to memes. The naturalist’s experience of wonder in the face of the world is held in tandem with an intellectual conviction that the material universe exhausts all reality. The natural world, being all there is, includes and encompasses human beings, whose thoughts and actions are ultimately constrained by the same physical laws governing fundamental particles. We humans are, of course, unique in that our behavior also demonstrates rationality, purposefulness, and the kinds of socially available meaning that we communicate through language and other cultural practices. The naturalist, however, believes that we can recognize all these hallmarks of human uniqueness while retaining a view of ourselves as entirely natural creatures whose behavior is in principle explainable using standard scientific methods.

This is good news, because progress in the natural sciences over the last 500 years has provided us with the methods to acquire reliable knowledge about the world of which we are a part. Rather than a mere act of faith taken on authority, the naturalist’s intellectual convictions about the forces governing the material universe are inspired by this scientific progress, as well as by the failure of appeals to th

"Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice"