Welcome to NaturalismNext
The Great Migration
Intro
Under the crushing influence of modernity and progress, we have decided to move NaturalismNext to substack. For those of you not familiar with our work, we have been running a philosophy blog on blogger for a couple years now. Unfortunately, blogger is a terrible medium that makes it hard for readers to follow content they like, and for us to interact with many people in the philosophy community who are now on substack. As a result, we have capitulated and migrated the blog here.
I hope this will allow those of you interested in our work to keep up with it, and for us to be able to interact more easily with our friends in the philosophy space. Another reason for our move is that we are both coming back from substantial breaks in our interaction in the online philosophy community. We have both been busy with our academic lives, and I (Sebastian) have been working on a substantial project that has taken up much of my time. Therefore, we thought starting this substack would be a good opportunity to revamp our engagement as we get back into the community.
The topics we plan to cover on the blog are broadly at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and politics. My background (Sebastian) as an undergraduate at Amherst College was in philosophy, religion, and psychology but my current academic track is in cognitive neuroscience. I currently work as a research assistant at a neuroscience lab and am applying to start a PhD program in the field in fall 2025. Lucas is currently a philosophy and mathematics student at CU Boulder interested in ethics and the philosophies of language, logic, and science. We are also pleased to announce that our friend Benjamin (whose work you can find at SecularApologist) will be joining the publication as a contributor. He is a philosophy autodidact interested in philosophy of religion, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and ethics.
Lucas and I were initially united by a shared focus on philosophy of religion, but both of us now have much broader interests. Therefore, you can expect the blog to be much more wide-ranging in its focus now and to include topics such as the philosophy of mind and science (particularly neuroscience), ethics, and politics. We wanted to take this opportunity to outline our current interest and planned projects for the blog.
Before outlining our projects, one note. We intend to make most of the posts on this substack free. However, if any of you are feeling generous enough to be paid subscribers, we are humbled by and grateful for your support: we are both poor students trying to make it in academia, and your financial support will encourage us to continue to write here and contribute to our careers! Subscribing will provide you access to exclusive posts, draft material for larger projects, monthly Q and As and philosophy discussions, and pretty much complete access to discuss or ask anything of us. Many thanks ahead of time. Now, onto what we are working on!
Sebastian
I have quite a few posts on the backburner that are almost done or in limbo waiting to be posted, and one major project that has taken up much of my time. Some of the essays that I have planned or already written are as follows:
Defending Frankfurt-style compatibilism and responding to ‘flicker of freedom’ concerns
Discussing ‘sourcehood’ objections to compatibilism (e.g. Galen Strawson)
Discussing the implications of inattentional blindness experiments for ‘commonsense’ theories of perception
An outline of eliminative materialism and defense of the position in light of modern research in neuroscience
A post on the history of Gaza in the leadup and aftermath of Israel’s disengagement of the strip in 2005
A post discussing the problems with democracy in the information age and defending alternative modes of government
A post outlining why I’m a type b-physicalist, critiquing both illusionism and anti physicalism. I intend to defend the phenomenal concept strategy on behalf of the physicalist, specifically with respect to whether our phenomenal concepts are transparent or opaque, and cover zombie arguments, mary’s room, and vagueness concerns re: physicalism
A post on the cognitive science of religion and its implications for theism (I have already written substantially on this topic, but I have been cleaning up my work and hope to repost a new version here)
Those are the smaller-scale posts and plans. As some of you already know, part of the reason I have been so absent is that I am currently working on a major project. About one and a half years ago, I released a blogpost entitled ‘Why I’m an atheist’ where I wrote a long essay outlining my reasons for rejecting theism. I am currently revising and rewriting that post, and it has turned out to be a very demanding endeavor. My goal is to make the piece a substantial contribution to the discussion, and so it will be quite comprehensive and get in-depth into some of the most important issues in the philosophy of religion.
To just get an idea of how much more comprehensive this new version of this post is: in the original post, I spent 1 page on skeptical theism. In this new post, that section alone is 40 pages. In the original post, I spent around 3-4 pages on fine-tuning: the new post again spends about 40 pages on the topic. In other words, this is less of a revision and more of a total redo that will probably be book-length. I hope to make it as substantive as possible and address what I view as the best and most interesting arguments for and against theism. However, this kind of work does not make for frequent blog posts because it is ‘invisible’: after writing and revising a major section, it is not as if I have anything I can now post as a one-off post. I do not want to promise any release date as this project is secondary to my work, but I hope to be done by around next summer. Currently, I would say I’m about 75% done - most of the major sections are written, and I’m currently revising them and adding in extra content. After I finish that piece, I will be taking a long break from philosophy of religion to focus on other topics
Lucas
I plan on eventually writing about the following topics:
Ordinary language philosophy and some of Plato’s earlier/aporetic dialogues
An approach to animal ethics inspired by Stanley Cavell, David Wiggins, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, John McDowell, Cora Diamond, and Wittgenstein. Some things I’d like to discuss in the post are: models of moral psychology, views of moral language, aspect perception, theories of meaning, and how these issues come to bear on the discourse surrounding ethical vegetarianism, akrasia, and the role of literature/poetry/activism in promoting moral change. I’ll try to explain why certain popular approaches to animal ethics may not capture the nature of our moral failings, and how a better way forward can be found in Aristotelian and Wittgensteinian traditions. If anyone is here from the blogspot, you might remember me hyping up a veganism post like 6 months ago. Well about 50% of the way through writing that my entire view of ethics kind of collapsed and I lost my mind, so this post is basically where that one ended up.
A second look at contemporary analytic philosophy of gender and some of its questionable uses of philosophy of language. As with the last post, I plan to characterize and critique discourse around questions like “what is a woman?” using tools from ordinary language philosophers.
Ethical problems faced by theists when responding to the problem of evil. I hope to talk about Simone Weil and (again) Cora Diamond, and apply some of their ideas to theodicies/defenses.
Don’t have a particular topic for this one but something logicky. I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy of logic/taking logic classes and wanna put it to use somehow.
Unfortunately I can’t say when I’ll write these. I’m pretty busy these days between the double-major course load and my social life–and the vegetarianism post might end up being a research project or my honors thesis. My plan for now is to grind some of these out during breaks.
Benjamin
I myself tend to be more spontaneous in my thinking and what I'm interested in. As such, I am more likely to come up with topics on a whim to deliver brief food for thought on, and take breaks from engagement with philosophy as frequently, and as long as needed. That’s not to say I don’t have some posts I’m currently committed to writing eventually—I certainly do—but when they’ll be released is anyone’s guess. Below is a list of posts I currently have planned in no particular order. Note that I haven’t even begun working on any of them yet
A broad post on phenomenal conservatism, the arguments for it, and my view on intuitions, non-inferential justification and foundationalist epistemology, expanding on work I’ve collaborated on here.
A post—or possibly a series—analyzing various arguments against physicalism of the mind, including the knowledge argument, zombie argument, counting argument, introspection argument, and others.
A critique of the perverted faculty argument, where I’ll argue that it’s unsound even within the framework of natural law theory. I’ll also independently make the case that natural law theory itself is an untenable view.
A post arguing that theism leads to normative skepticism and moral paralysis, drawing on a paper from Sharon Street. This piece will focus on addressing common responses theists might use to escape these issues and demonstrating why those responses fail.
A collaborative post with Sebastian on skeptical theism, specifically addressing Perry Hendricks’ recent book on the topic.
An extensive critique of abductive natural theology, where I’ll argue that the project—particularly Bayesian or inference-to-the-best-explanation arguments for theism—is fundamentally a failure. I will support my case using insights from the philosophy of science, and by arguing that such arguments generally fail to abide by proper standards of hypothesis testing, and statistical inference.
A post examining various versions of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and the arguments for them. I’ll argue that defenses of PSRs amenable to contingency arguments are unconvincing, and I’ll propose an alternative framework for understanding explanation-seeking in scientific practice which doesn’t entail or support the PSR as theists in philosophy of religion conceive of it.
A post detailing my answers to the 2020 Philpapers Questions, where I’ll explore my broad views in some depth (this might be alongside my fellow contributors)
Cleaned up improved versions of old blogposts, in particular on the Failure of Theodicy and Ontological Arguments, and my defense of Incompatible properties arguments against theism.
These posts—aside from the PhilPapers Survey post, which should be relatively quick to complete—will likely be larger-scale projects that demand substantial time and investment. Consequently, they probably won’t be ready anytime soon, and in the meantime, I’ll likely share shorter, spontaneous, occasional posts with some scattered thoughts. Additionally, for what it’s worth, I’ve been collaborating with Sebastian, helping him refine ideas and develop arguments for his upcoming revised “Why I’m an Atheist” piece.
I can't tell you how excited I am for this project! Looking forward to all of this!
This looks absolutely awesome! Its like a philosophy wishlist of nearly every topic I find interesting! Wish you guys all the best with academics and can't wait.