Naturalizm czy naturalizmy? Dlaczego współczesny naturalizm metafizyczny nie jest stanowiskiem jednolitym?

Abstrakt

Naturalism or naturalisms? Why contemporary metaphysical naturalism is not homogenous?

The paper is an attempt to answer the question posed in the title. Answering this question requires a few conceptual clarifications, which are handled in the first part of the article. Two variants of metaphysical naturalism are distinguished there — scientific and so called ‘liberal’ one. In the next part of the paper differences in accounts of the idea of nature, prevalent in the history of human thought, from ancient Greece and modern mechanistic metaphysics of 17th and 18th centuries to post-Hegelian historical accounts, are revealed. Heterogeneity of contemporary scientific naturalism is exhibited afterwards with regard to distinct intellectual trends in contemporary evolutionary biology, represented by two prominent figures — Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould — applying two different concepts of nature — mechanistic and historical. The main thesis of the paper is that contemporary metaphysical naturalism, the doctrine which holds that natural sciences contain all genuine knowledge of the world is not homogenous, because it combines at least two intellectual traditions, built around different accounts of the idea of nature.