In this essay I examine if naturalism can be a reasonable worldview to embrace for well-informed and reflective people. The rationality of naturalism will be concentrated on whether a naturalistic ontology, that holds that the ultimate reality is impersonal and material, can incorporate our self-conception as rational, free, meaning-creating and evaluative creatures. One objection against naturalism is that a materialistic worldview that holds that reality primarily - and for some exclusively - consist of mindless, meaningless, unfree, and non-rational brute physical facts, is uncapable of grounding or incorporating our self-conception as mentioned above. To redeem naturalism from this problem it would have to postulate the existence of subjects in addition to physical entities. I will therefore examine the possibility whether it is possible for a naturalistic position to incorporate the existence of mind or mental phenomena in their ontology. The challenge with incorporating mental phenomena in naturalism is that naturalists give high priority to material objects in their ontology, they also tend to treat science as the most important source of knowledge that we have. This is a challenge because we cannot locate subjects in objects, nor can we verify subjects with science.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-384419 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Vasquez, Fernando |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Teologiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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