À la recherche d’un naturalisme intégral repensé

Abstract

In Search of a Comprehensive and Rethought Naturalism. Classical, traditional naturalism, strongly bound to materialism, to physics and chemistry, is indifferent to, or tries to reduce, wide-ranging natural fields such as biological and psychic phenomena, consciousness, symbolism and culture. Thus traditional naturalism has to be rethought to render it more comprehensive and more adequate to the hierarchy of natural systems while satisfying the basic
requirement of never introducing extra- or super-natural elements. Now in order to improve the essence and the reach of naturalism, a series of ideas are proposed, and among them we find the following: (I) that both science and metaphysics should be taken seriously since there is no
science without metaphysical foundations; (II) that the development of emergentism is essential; (III) the idea that the best explanation of natural systems and their becoming shows the necessity of things, an explanation which takes into account formal and final causes; (IV) the suggestion that, since nothing comes out nothing, there is an underlying causal mechanism producing the qualitative emergent discontinuities visible in the hierarchy of natural systems. Finally, (V) given that the entire reality is natural and that values are real, values are natural entities.