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Naturalism
This entry provides an overview of the naturalistic trends of ancient political thought and contrasts them with variants of contemporary naturalism. It also presents a selection of key naturalistic theses in ancient political thought.
Naturalism in Contemporary Philosophy
There are two main variants of contemporary naturalism: methodological and substantive naturalism. At the core of methodological naturalism is a particular understanding of the relation between philosophical inquiry and contemporary science (hard science, like physics; soft science, like sociology or political science; or both). According to methodological naturalists, philosophy needs to be congruous with scientific methodology. Methodological naturalism is developed as a reaction to the practice of armchair conceptual analysis that dominated Anglo-American philosophy since Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege and maintained a strict division between philosophical and scientific inquiry. According to the philosophical tradition of conceptual analysis, philosophy differs from science in both its object of inquiry and its methodology. Philosophy aims at the study of logical relations between concepts with the aid of a priori analysis. Some methodological naturalists claim that philosophical inquiry must be altogether replaced by scientific inquiry (replacement naturalism). Some others adopt the more moderate thesis that the goal of philosophical inquiry is to provide norms of proper theorizing on the basis of successful scientific practices (normative naturalism).
Substantive naturalism takes two forms: ontological naturalism and semantic naturalism. Onto-logical naturalism is the thesis that reality consists of one type of entity: natural entities (also referred to as physical entities). Natural entities are the objects of study of the natural sciences and to which the laws of nature apply. For example, onto-logical naturalists deny that there are mental events or properties (e.g., thoughts or emotions) that either are not reduced to, or do not properly cause, physical events or properties. Semantic naturalism is the thesis that nonnatural predicates (like “good” or “beautiful”) have the same reference as relevant scientific predicates, that is, predicates that are used in the language of hard or soft sciences, and that a proper philosophical analysis of nonnatural predicates should identify their coreferential scientific counterparts. For example, a proper analysis of “good” should show that it refers to the same property as “utility maximize,” which is amenable to proper scientific inquiry. (This classification of contemporary naturalism relies heavily on Brian Leiter's useful classification.)
Naturalism in Ancient Political Thought
Assimilating naturalism in contemporary philosophy with the naturalistic doctrines of ancient political theorists and philosophers may lead to confusion. For example, though the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle have important naturalistic trends, these thinkers are hardly methodological naturalists. The congruence of philosophical inquiry with political science, which methodological naturalism about political philosophy could be taken to recommend, makes sense only in a context in which philosophical and scientific inquiries are properly individuated. However, philosophical and scientific inquiry about the political realm are not neatly distinguished but are rather interwoven in Plato's and Aristotle's philosophies. It is equally misleading to take naturalistic elements in Plato's political philosophy to indicate commitment to substantive naturalism. Plato does not identify nature as the proper object of a natural science (at least as natural sciences are currently conceived) and allows nonphysical entities (e.g., souls) to be parts of the causal network of nature.
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