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Panexperientialism is the view that experience exists throughout nature and that mentality is not essential to it. In this chapter, the possibility of panexperientialism is examined by looking on its strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of a Liberal Naturalist. To understand the theoretical option of having a panexperientialist world, the author assumed that every subject of experience possessed a field of experience containing a variety of phenomenal qualities called qualitative field. Evidence for panexperientialism's existence and its coherence are also discussed in detail in this chapter.

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.

In this chapter, Drizou argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) questions the rationalization of modern progress by depicting the turn of the century as a moment that wavers between the urgent incalculability of the future and the conventional knowledge of the past, embodied in the two main plotlines of the novel: Carrie’s hasty anticipation of the future and Hurstwood’s steady retreat to the past. For many scholars, the intersecting plotlines of Sister Carrie suggest the contrasting narratives of progress and decline that confirm the irreversibility of fate in turn-of-the-century naturalist texts. Dreiser complicates the teleology of this model, however, by dramatizing the temporal unpredictability of evolutionary tropes (change, adaptability, and chance) to illustrate wavering as a mode that allows his characters to measure their options and remain open to the future. This wavering mode furnishes a new paradigm of thinking about the fin de siècle as an incalculably open jangle that welcomes (and embodies) the resistance to rationalized discourses of modernity. In this sense, Dreiser’s novel prompts us to question and rethink our contemporary processes of rationalization, such as the standardization of knowledge through period-based models of teaching and temporally restrictive paradigms of scholarship.

This chapter explores the changing visions for one of the first subject specialist periodical formats of the nineteenth century, the natural history periodical. It follows three broadly differing visions for natural history periodicals between 1828 and 1865, which began with John Claudius Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, was adapted by Richard Taylor and William Francis’s Annals and Magazine of Natural History, and ended with Thomas Henry Huxley’s Natural History Review. For Loudon, a natural history periodical was a communal space where the work of the periodical was “supported by the voluntary contribution of their readers.” For Huxley, natural history was an antiquated practice, in need of reform. In between these two visions lay the Annals and Magazine, which struck a balance between these two poles. A mixture of these visions would form foundational aspects of the specialist scientific periodical culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These visions would take different form in specialist scientific periodicals like Nature in the late nineteenth century but also in more subject specific periodicals like the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology. Non-professional naturalists, moreover, continued to contribute to natural history, but increasingly in their own periodicals such as Hardwicke’s Science Gossip.

This introduction begins by recovering the prehistory of the terms scientific naturalism and scientific naturalist, attempting to reclaim them as authentic actors’ categories. It also assesses their validity as widely-invoked historiographic categories. Subsequent sections survey the historiography of Victorian scientific naturalism over the last four decades, and assess how the essays collected in the volume offer new perspectives, focusing on issues of community, identity and continuity, that, together, move this historical work forward.

Chapter one is about Gary Larson’s life and career. First, the author looks into Larson’s childhood in Tacoma, Washington, tracing the connections between his unconventional upbringing and the themes and jokes in his later cartoons. He then charts Larson’s circuitous route towards a career in newspaper cartoons through a number of diversions and dead ends; the story of his ultimate break into comics in 1980 is especially fascinating since it was achieved with so little awareness on Larson’s part of what kind of profession he was pursuing. The author continues by tracing the initially slow, but eventually exponential growth of the panel’s popularity, highlighting along the way many of the accolades, controversies, and stand out cartoons of Larson’s career. I addition, the chapter highlights his arrival as a culturally significant figure through several key achievements: the ubiquity of his book collections and merchandising material, the unprecedented amount of fan and hate mail he received, and the way his work was embraced so avidly by niche reading communities such as scientists and academics. The chapter concludes with a description of how Larson decided to retire The Far Side after only a fifteen-year run (while it was still popular) in order to go out on a high note and preserve his own sanity.

In which we return to the original subject: the role of natural history in both science and human affairs. The legacy of past naturalists is explored, and the importance of long-term data sets is examined. The chapter and the book conclude with a discussion of new initiatives that strive to restore natural history’s status within both the scientific community and the public imagination.

This chapter focuses on the philosophical receptions of the Grammar of Assent, especially from 1960 to 2012. It draws attention to what people have said about the philosophical relevance, and aim, of the Grammar and how they have read (and evaluated) it on two issues: (1) whether Newman properly distinguishes the phenomenological from the epistemological conditions of belief formation and (2) whether his appeal to the illative sense, as a personal criterion, resolves (or complicates) the problem of securing a common measure (an independent standard of justification) by which radically different communities can adjudicate their claims. Two areas (Newman and the Naturalist tradition, and the depth of Newman’s thought on various epistemological issues) can no longer be seen merely as phenomenologically relevant. Instead, they require serious epistemological analysis and development.

This chapter provides a philosophical discussion of Analytical Naturalism and Subjectivism. It first considers several types of metaethical view, namely: Semi-Cognitivism, Cognitivism, Nihilism, Non-Cognitivism, Non-Naturalist Cognitivism, Analytical Naturalism, and Non-Analytical Naturalism. It then argues that we ought to reject Non-Cognitivism and the two forms of Naturalism (Analytical Naturalism and Non-Analytical Naturalism). It also suggests that normativity is either an illusion, or involves irreducibly normative truths. If we used the words ‘reason’, ‘should’, and ‘ought’ in their internal senses, Subjectivism about Reasons would not be a substantive normative view, but a concealed tautology. The chapter concludes by discussing normative beliefs and the concept of internal reason.

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.

This chapter describes Rationalism. The Naturalist Argument for Normative Skepticism has several strands: our normative epistemic beliefs were often advantageous, by causing us to have true worldly beliefs which helped us to survive and reproduce; because these normative beliefs were advantageous, natural selection made us disposed to have them; these beliefs would have had the same effects whether or not they were true; these beliefs would have been advantageous whether or not they were true; natural selection would have disposed us to have these beliefs whether or not they were true; we have no empirical evidence for the truth of these beliefs; we have no other way of knowing whether these beliefs are true. The chapter examines normative beliefs that are grounded on alethic beliefs about what is certain or likely to be true, along with practical and moral beliefs that were not produced by natural selection, or other evolutionary forces. It then turns from epistemic reasons to practical reasons, and to questions about what matters.