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The problem of occasion: why did Lewis write the Chronicles of Narnia? Writing was always the way to freedom for him, and the debate about Naturalism with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club caused him difficulties which may have required mental and imaginative liberation. In Miracles, his defence of Idealism, he had argued that human reason was monarchical and that Naturalists preferred to live in a democratic universe. In part, the first Narnia Chronicle was written to demonstrate the same case imaginatively as he had made propositionally in his apologetics.

This final chapter returns to the topic of naturalism, exploring the implications of Cognitive Pluralism for naturalism. The answer depends on the type of “naturalism” that is in question. In philosophy of science, naturalism indicates the view that philosophy of science should not proceed through a priori reasoning, but be guided by what is found in the sciences themselves. In this respect, this book has pursued a “naturalistic” approach. However, if naturalism means that the mind can be wholly accommodated in the world of nature as understood by the natural sciences, the conclusions to be drawn are antinaturalistic. Pluralism is antireductionistic. And cognitivism treats the mind as being in a special sense prior to our models of the world, including our scientific models.

The early responses to the Treatise show that the issue of “atheism” was neither peripheral nor irrelevant to the way that Hume's own contemporaries understood his aims and objectives. Most contemporary Hume scholars maintain, however, that this label, not only misrepresents Hume's intentions in the Treatise but that it also misrepresents his position on the subject of religion as presented in his later writings (which are understood to be more “directly” or “explicitly” concerned with religion). The immediate aim of this chapter is to develop a clearer understanding of the way that Hume and his contemporaries interpreted “atheism” and the specific doctrines that were associated with it. Once this standard is (back) in place, we will be in a position to determine the extent to which the charge of “atheism” fits the actual content of the Treatise.

This chapter, central to this book, elaborates on the theory of spirits that has been advanced to explain numerous kinds of phenomena, a few of which were sampled in the first two chapters. The importance of abductive argument in advancing the existence of unobservable beings or objects, as opposed to deductive and probabilistic reasoning, is defended. The theory of spirits is construed as empiricist in character, whose descriptions are sometimes theory-laden and whose postulated beings are contextually defined primarily by the causal roles these postulated beings play in the theory. The view of physical objects advanced by phenomenalism, such as that found in many logical positivists, is examined, with a view to explaining how it illuminates challenges that beset an empirical approach to religion. The boundary of naturalism is discussed, especially inasmuch as the spirits postulated to exist in religion are definable by their causal links to phenomena or objects that are unquestionable naturalistic.

Since physicalism is inadequate to place conscious experience in the universe, the author looks at a version of Liberal Naturalism as an alternative. Liberal Naturalism is the view that nature is built on a single fundamental kind and some aspects or properties of this fundamental natural kind are not physical. Although Liberal Naturalism might seem adequate, the author finds it too liberating. Thus, this chapter provides a brief discussion on the problems and challenges it faces. The author also illustrates in this chapter how consciousness can exist at the middle level of nature and examines its causal relevance.

The previous chapters cited puzzles and tensions that Liberal Naturalism had encountered beyond those associated with orthodox psychology and neuroscience. This chapter explores five further issues concerning Liberal Naturalism with each having the character of a paradox: the unity of consciousness, the subjective instant, the knowledge paradox, the superfluity of consciousness, and the shallow structure of qualia. It aims to expose the intuitions behind the paradoxes with the purpose of identifying the problems from within a Liberal Naturalist framework. Given a new perspective, the author concludes this chapter by arguing that several possibilities concerning what nature is like have been ignored.

The Consciousness Hypothesis is an application of the Central Thesis that lifts experiencing up to full-fledged consciousness. This chapter evaluates several issues raised from the previous chapters in part 1 and demonstrates how the proposal presented here permits Liberal Naturalism to evade the explanatory failings of pure physicalism. Its explanatory success, however, is exemplified by solving the puzzles, paradoxes, and tensions confronting Liberal Naturalism. If the preeminent virtue guiding construction of the Theory of Causal Significance was simplicity while the Carrier Theory of Causation raised intelligibility and uniformity into position as equal partners, the Conscious Hypothesis is an attempt to show fruitfulness. In the latter part of this chapter, the author demonstrates how this fruitfulness supplements the philosophical reasons introduced earlier for accepting the existence of receptive connections and attempts to provide additional support to the model.

Naturalism is a species of descriptivism, and is described as the proposal to specify the truth conditions of moral statements without reference to moral words, i.e. without reference to the attitudes of the speakers. Hence, the truth conditions of moral statements are non‐moral properties. Hare subdivides Naturalism into ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ varieties. The variety of Naturalism that interests Hare in this chapter is objectivist naturalism, according to which the non‐moral properties are objective. Naturalism, Hare argues, results inevitably in relativism, and any ethical theory that implies relativism must be rejected.

Intuitionism, the second type of descriptivism, is the theory that the truth conditions of moral statements depend on irreducible moral properties, which must be defined in moral terms. The intuitionist claims that we have knowledge of moral truths derived from moral intuition. However, because it is a subjective experience, one person's intuition may differ from another's, and the theory offers no way to decide between them. Intuitionism, Hare argues, is really a kind of Subjectivist Naturalism, or Subjectivism; and, as with Naturalism, it also leads to relativism. Therefore, because it is exhausted by these two theories, descriptivism in general must be abandoned if we are to attain the sort of objectivity that will allow us to avoid relativism.

Many contemporary theorists reject the notion of agent causation on the grounds that it conflicts with metaphysical Naturalism, a.k.a. the emerging scientific picture of the world. There is little basis for this claim. We must sharply distinguish the plausible claim that macrophysical phenomena arise out of and are causally sustained by microphysical events (’The Causal Unity of Nature Thesis’) from the far from evident claim that all such phenomena are constituted by more fundamental processes (’The Micro‐Macro Constitution Thesis’). Granted the former thesis, why accept the latter? The Constitution Thesis is not empirically established, nor does it follow from the Unity Thesis, as is shown by the possibility of some higher‐level features being emergent in a robust sense.

Another variant of pragmatism, instrumentalism, flourished under the auspices of John Dewey at the University of Chicago in the 1890s. Instrumentalism was less interested than pragmatism in saving religion and more committed to intervention in social life and politics. When Dewey moved to Columbia University in New York City in 1904, he soon commanded intellectual leadership for philosophy in that city and its many institutions of learning and culture. After his retirement in 1929, Columbia ‘Naturalists’ carried on his work and were leading secular liberals in the wider intellectual world.

Discusses the problem of knowing that became attached to the idea of the “mulatto/a” as a way to express anxieties about the instability of political loyalties during the Haitian Revolution. Argues that there is a hidden dynamism in early naturalist narratives about “race” that reinforces the idea of natural phenotypic enmity between “mulattoes” and “negroes.” The reiteration of these claims in early 19th-century writings about the Haitian Revolution is shown to have been used later to explain the political distinctions to be found in the territories of Haitian leaders, Alexandre Pétion and Henry Christophe. The existence of two Haitis in the early 19th century thus became one of the most prominently evoked examples of “monstrous hybridity” in all of the Atlantic World.

Chapter 6 sets out to show REC can allow for content-involving cognition in nature without itself falling foul of the Hard Problem of Content and without introducing unbridgeable evolutionary discontinuity or gaps in nature. Thus it crucially defuses critical concerns about REC’s NOC program in order to establish that it is a tenable way of explaining the how content-involving cognition arose and arises naturally, and where content can be found in nature. It then lays out the broad outlines of REC’s proposed explanation for the Natural Origins of Content – its NOC program that draws on Neo-Pragmatist resources and advocates the adoption of a Relaxed as opposed to Strict Scientific Naturalism. It advances a multi-storey explanation, involving kinks not breaks. This explains how content-involving cognition could have arisen through the mastery of special socio-cultural practices, providing new resources but without changing the fundamental character of cognition. Its basic sketch of how the NOC program might be pursued paves the way for further research.

This chapter examines how the ‘return to the story’ has been used to further an anti-modernist agenda and to delegitimize avant-garde or experimental mid-century novelistic aesthetics. Specifically, it examines the work of Jean Rouaud, a writer whose investment in the ‘story’ is exemplary of a wholehearted adoption of an anti-modernist conception of literary return. Putting Rouaud’s sprawling and digressive essayistic adventure novel The Imitation of Happiness (2006) into dialogue with Rouaud’s fictional and essayistic production since the early 2000s, this chapter problematizes the literary historical narrative that underpins Rouaud’s ‘rehabilitation’ of the adventure novel. It then zooms out to consider how this anti-modernist emphasis on adventurous fiction is echoed in the rhetoric of the famous littérature-monde manifesto. A short analysis of littérature-monde then demonstrates how the return to the story functions not only as a literary history but also as a cultural map. This chapter concludes with a critique of the anti-modernist literary historical narrative of the ‘return to the story.’

This chapter presents Non-Analytical Naturalism. According to Non-Analytical Naturalists, we use some words to express concepts and make claims that are irreducibly normative, in the sense that these concepts and claims cannot be defined or restated in non-normative terms. When we turn to facts, however, there is no such deep distinction. All facts are natural, but some of these facts are also normative, since we can also state these facts by making irreducibly normative claims. Most of these Naturalists make claims that are not about reasons, but about morality. This chapter examines such claims, with particular emphasis on Normative Naturalism, Metaphysical Naturalism, Moral Naturalism, and the Co-extensiveness Argument. It also considers whether, as Non-Analytical Naturalists believe, irreducibly normative claims might state natural facts.

This chapter looks in detail at Naturalism and Nihilism, first by applying the Triviality Objection to Non-Analytical Naturalism about reasons. If normativity is best conceived as involving reasons or apparent reasons, the main question is whether facts about reasons might be natural facts. And the Triviality Objection takes a simpler, clearer form. In his defence of Subjectivism, Mark Schroeder claims that when some fact explains why some act would fulfil one of our present desires, this fact is a reason for us to act in this way. The chapter also explains natural facts based on two opposing views, Soft Naturalism and Hard Naturalism, along with the Soft Naturalist's Dilemma and its Further Information version.