Wednesday, January 23, 2008

What Naturalism Encompasses

The branch of philosophy referred to as Naturalism has long existed in the Greek world with early Philosophers and contains the ideas that transcend the scientific understanding of the world. Naturalism focuses on the essential form of the natural world as unaffected by humans or human influence. This branch includes science (natural) and metaphysics. The topic also deals with the artificial verses natural. Metaphysics is the transcending of science and includes cosmology and ontology and deals with the nature of reality, why the world exists (and how it came to be), the existence of the world and objects outside of our mind and the objective nature of the world as we know it.
Naturalist philosophy deals with our surroundings and the ideas we have of them; how our minds perceive our environment and our ideas about objects that exist within it. Naturalism also involves a good deal of focus on the empirical world and our thoughts within that topic.

1 comment:

Libris Fidelis said...

Since you appear to be very rational, permit me to kindly make the following announcement.

Your blog "American Philosophy" uses the commonly mis-used term of "America" for our nation. America is not a country, it is a vertical hemisphere almost 300 years older than is our United States OF (which means IN) America.
Just a point of geographic and historic truth.

So your title can actually be quite correct, provided you do not leave out the other Americans living in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, etc. There actually is no "North America", only a "northern America" (with a small "n"), a "central America", and a "southern America".

I just wish people used Definitionaries rather than those catalogues of mis-used words called "Dictonaries".

Best wishes to you.
Ronald Kinum
a.k.a. Libris Fidelis
LibrisFidelis@activist.com