This post is a continuation of a previous entry on the merits of analytical philosophy (see here for context).

The reason, I suspect, that naturalistic philosophy doesn’t come up in debates about the conflict between continental and analytical philosophy—a philosophy that treats itself as strongly continuous with science—was that philosophers typically consider naturalist philosophy to be just another niche area of analytic philosophy. This is reflected in how the philosopher Liam Kofi Bright talks about naturalistic metaphilosophy:

Analytic philosophy has long had ambitions to something like scientific status—often expressed in works of naturalistic metaphilosophy, and at times to the point of cringingly insecure self parody. Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983—they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don’t know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it’s not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field’s youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.

I now believe that identifying naturalist philosophy as just one strand of analytic philosophy is a mistake. The very approach to doing philosophy, as I emphasized in my last blog post, is fundamentally different and opposed to each other. But I acknowledge that most philosophers I have ever discussed this topic with were quite surprised to hear me say that I did not consider myself an analytic philosopher. I considered naturalist, naturalistic, naturalized (I’ll treat these terms as synonyms for this post) philosophy as a different kind of philosophy altogether.

We split analytic from continental philosophy, and we can split naturalist philosophy as a third kind of philosophy. To create such a tripartite distinction, I believe, would be incredibly valuable. In many ways, naturalist philosophy can often be closer to the work of continental philosophers, who had naturalist leanings, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or Georges Canguilhem. It would, in principle, be possible to create a diagram in the form of a triangle in which different philosophers could be placed according to their orientations.

The existence of philosophers who embrace hybrid or more permissive methodologies does not deny that these approaches capture genuine differences, though continental philosophy is admittedly hard to capture without its traditional categorization as non-analytic philosophy. This is one of the reasons naturalist philosophers and continental philosophers often have much closer affinities than opponents of ‘scientistic philosophy’ may realize.

Some of my readers, no doubt, will already be skeptical of analytic philosophy, not because they necessarily share my naturalist view of how the field should operate, but because they have a fondness for philosophers such as Nietzsche and others who fill popular book sections. While naturalist philosophy is often strawmanned as a naive scientism, I hope to encourage my readers to seriously consider it as a different and more pluralistic way of seeing philosophy altogether, one that draws on the plurality of the sciences, rather than the traditionally restrictive, a priori toolkit of analytic philosophy.

If nothing else, the naturalist philosopher offers a much more optimistic view of the future of philosophy* than the more bleak image offered by Bright:

For what I think is gone, and is not coming back, is any hope that from all this will emerge a well-validated and rational-consensus-generating theory of grand topics of interest. We can, and we will, keep generating puzzles for any particular answer given, we will never persuade our colleagues who disagree, we will never finally settle what to say about the simple cases to be able to move on to the grand problems of philosophy. My anecdotal impression is that junior philosophers are hyper aware of these bleak prospects for anything like creation of a shared scientific paradigm.

Among naturalist philosophers, whether faculty or students, there is no pessimistic sense of being trapped on a ship without a sail and a crew that is unwilling to row together. Naturalistic philosophy is like a modern ship with an engine driving us ever forward. Philosophy in this vision is part of science, part of a larger enterprise of natural philosophy, before it was separated into the artificial boundaries we know today. Naturalist philosophers are excited about the progress made on old philosophical problems with the aid of the sciences—the mind, the nature of life, or the structure of reality.

To make philosophy prosper once more in universities and the public, we must ask it to return to a state it was once in: a part of natural philosophy continuous with the sciences.

*Anecdotally, I have never felt more enthusiastic about the future of philosophy, then when I was able to work together with scientists, such as Nicola Clayton’s lab, to bring us closer to answering what it is like to be a crow, my work with biologists at Oxford in measuring biological complexity, or my ongoing work on several projects together with animal welfare scientists. Young philosophers in search of a shared and progressing paradigm won’t have far to look. It is not all doom and gloom.