Philo

Volume 12, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2009

Theism and Naturalism

Andrew Melnyk
Pages 188-199

Naturalism as a Philosophical Paradigm

I develop the conjecture that “naturalism” in philosophy names not a thesis but a paradigm in something like Thomas Kuhn’s sense, i.e., a set of commitments, shared by a group of investigators, whose acceptance by the members of the group powerfully influences their day-to-day investigative practice. I take a stab at spelling out the shared commitments that make up naturalism, and the logical and evidential relations among them.