Posted: May 23, 2011 4:20 pm
Chrisw wrote:People try to dress it up but I think that mostly (apart from idealists and a few other oddballs) when people say 'natural' they mean 'physical' and naturalism is just another way of saying physicalism.
Opponents of naturalism are invariably dualists. Religious people think that the physical cannot account for mind (they believe in absolute free will and that their self can plausibly survive after their bodily death). The same reasoning allows for dis-embodied minds (spirits, ghosts, gods) - if mind is distinct from matter then why wouldn't it be able to exist apart from it?
Substance dualism is to be regarded as supernaturalistic, but many philosophers don't use "naturalism" and "physicalism" synonymously, because there is such a thing as a naturalistic attribute dualism (as defended by e.g. David Chalmers), according to which mental properties are properties of physical substances but nonphysical, physically irreducible sui generis properties of those. And there are other isms which can be called naturalistic but hardly materialistic such as neutral monism, according to which the fundamental natural properties are neither physical nor mental.
"In general, we use 'anti-materialism' to refer to the disjunction of a certain cluster of views incompatible with materialism: namely, dualism (property dualism or substance dualism); robust neutral monism (neither physical properties nor mental properties have metaphysical priority over the other); anti-reductionist versions of hylomorphism; anti-reductionist accounts of normativity; 'liberal naturalism' (as opposed to reductive naturalism); idealism (e.g., phenomenalism); epistemic stalemate (the materialism/anti-materialism debate ultimately ends in a draw); enigma (the Mind-Body Problem has no solution); various anti-realisms (including those that deny the legitimacy, or even the intelligibility, of the Mind-Body Problem)."
(Koons, Robert C., and George Bealer, eds. Introduction to The Waning of Materialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xvii, n. xvi)