Posted: Apr 15, 2013 9:33 pm
lpetrich wrote:Is there a real difference?
It seems that the two agree on an important feature: that reality is fundamentally impersonal and nonmental.
But beyond that, it's rather difficult for me to follow, and some of the issues seem to me to be side issues. Like traditional atomism vs. field theories, including quantum ones. I say that because both are equally impersonal and nonmental.
Materialism, Naturalism and Physicalism are roughly similar terms. Physicalism is generally considered a more sophisticated notion that materialism:
In contemporary philosophy, physicalism is most frequently associated with the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind, regarding which physicalism holds that all that has been ascribed to "mind" is more correctly ascribed to "brain" or the activity of the brain. Physicalism is also called "materialism", but the term "physicalism" is preferable because it has evolved with the physical sciences to incorporate far more sophisticated notions of physiccality than matter, for example wave/particle relationships and non-material forces produced by particles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism
Naturalism does not seem to have a commonly accepted precise definition:
The term ‘naturalism’ has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed ‘naturalists’ from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit’ (Krikorian 1944, Kim 2003).
So understood, ‘naturalism’ is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#NatPhy