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........

© Psychology Today