This talk is based on the speaker’s book Natural Ideas (Amazon 2023), and will defend and discuss ‘naturalism’, which is the view within metaphysics and the philosophy of nature that, from a human viewpoint, nothing exists except what we refer to by the term ‘nature’. Hence nothing exists which can be called ‘supernatural’. The first part will say how Naturalism is best understood, and offer brief critiques of the main ontologies which go beyond the apparent natural world (namely, spirituality, pure mind, and abstract entities). The second part will then ask ‘so what?’, and outline a system of philosophy which is grounded in naturalism. This will propose coherent accounts of truth, reason, concepts, mind, knowledge, reality, abstracta, laws of nature, and values, all based on naturalistic assumptions.
