This introduction broaches the question of how naturalism rose to dominance in the modern West. Naturalism in this context is understood as a rejection of belief in the supernatural. This distinctive feature of Western modernity is at odds, not only with its own religious past, but also with what has been true for virtually all other cultures. Whereas it was once impossible not to assume the existence of the supernatural, this has now become one option among others, and one that is typically thought to be lacking in rational support. The book seeks to account for this unique historical development in two related ways. First, it explores the histories of the two key terms in this understanding—‘belief’ and ‘supernatural’—showing how they came to take on their present meanings in the modern period. Second, it shows how advocates of naturalism necessarily subscribe to a progressive view of history that can vindicate the adoption of these two categories in their modern sense.

This chapter gives an account of the origins of our present understanding of the natural/supernatural divide, showing how the terminology of the ‘supernatural’ first emerged in the Middle Ages and gradually assumed its modern form between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The attendant ‘isms’—naturalism and supernaturalism—arrive at the end of this period, during the 1800s. The original context for the naturalism/supernaturalism distinction was neither science nor philosophy, but the sphere of biblical criticism. From there it was imported into a scientific context. The nineteenth century also witnessed attempts to reconstruct the history of science with a view to arguing for a long-standing alliance between naturalism and science. A more accurate portrayal of the relevant history shows, to the contrary, that ‘science’ had been consistently aligned with theistic assumptions about the regularities of nature. These regularities were formalised as laws of nature in the seventeenth century, at which time they were understood as divinely authored imperatives to which nature necessarily conformed. In the nineteenth century, what had originally been understood as expressions of the divine will were simply redescribed in purely naturalistic terms by advocates of naturalism. Ironically, they were now claimed to represent evidence against theistic readings of nature.

There is a form of naturalism which runs through Kripke’s account of rule-following. Given the overarching structure of his account, in which Wittgenstein’s naturalism is made to serve the ends of a skeptical solution to the paradox of the regress of interpretations, it inevitably has the effect of giving a reductive interpretation of it. The reductionist aspect was made clear by those, such as Crispin Wright, who made Kripke’s naturalistic element explicit, using non-normative notions in a constructive account of what going by a rule consists in. I look at Wittgenstein’s pivot toward naturalism in the early 1930s and trace its development to the discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. I argue for a different understanding of Wittgenstein’s naturalism and its relation to the paradox of PI §201, one which allows it to escape the charges of both reductionism and an unsatisfactory form of quietism.

Carnap’s naturalism evidently differs from Quine’s, but the precise nature of this difference has proven elusive to generations of commentators. This chapter focuses on what Quine defends as his “provincial” naturalism against a Carnapian “cosmopolitan” alternative. The problem with this contrast, however, is that Quine does not represent a pure form of what he calls a “provincial” view – he vacillates between provincial and cosmopolitan temptations. To illustrate a purely provincial view the position of Peter Strawson is held up as an opposite, provincial extreme to Carnapian cosmopolitanism, and while Quine is clearly tempted by both these extremes, the attempt to locate him on a continuum between them is complicated by his evident indecisiveness. This is further illustrated by his tergiversations about analyticity; after initially denying that there was even an explicandum worth bothering about, he later offered his own ordinary-language-based account of analyticity, without feeling any need to supply a more exact explication; there would appear to be no way to resolve the resulting stand-off with the cosmopolitan standpoint. This chapter suggests a more robust explicandum for analyticity (and cosmopolitanism more generally). We come back, in the end, to the confrontation between Carnap and Quine in Chicago in 1950, where Carnap convinced Quine that their differences did not concern any question about which there could be right or wrong, correct or incorrect; it is regretted that Quine soon lost this lesson from sight.

This chapter discusses whether the appropriation of Kuhnian thoughts by the so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge is appropriate. In order to answer the question of appropriate appropriation, Kuhn’s and the Strong Programme’s stances on two “isms” are compared: relativism and naturalism. It is shown that the Strong Programme clearly goes beyond Kuhn and breaks more radically with philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, there are also philosophical continuities and similarities.

This chapter explores how Nietzsche’s shift towards a naturalistic methodology in the late 1870s offers him an axiological and epistemic apparatus that radically alters his philosophical articulation of pessimism, and consequently affects his attitude towards it. The chapter argues that contemporary Nietzsche scholarship has largely overlooked the importance of Human, All Too Human as a crucial stage of Nietzsche’s development in approaching the question of the value of existence. By exploring the influence of Paul Rée, Eugen Dühring, and the neo-Kantians, it introduces Nietzsche’s own ‘frame of reference’ argument against pessimism as a metaphysical view, and distinguishes between different possible interpretations of it.

This chapter reconsiders the significance of The Beautiful and Damned (1922) to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s development as a writer and his place in American modernist literature. This second novel occupies a minor position in the Fitzgerald canon and is often regarded as a move away from his experimentations with romanticism, aestheticism, and decadence to naturalism. By contrast, this chapter argues that the novel remains committed to fin-de-siècle theories of aesthetic hedonism propounded by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde in formal, thematic, and intellectual terms and brings them into productive tension with naturalism. The Beautiful and Damned is informed by Paterean theories of perception and hedonism in its preoccupation with the brevity of life, the fragility of beauty, and the necessity of cultivating a heightened mode of perception and consciousness. Naturalism, meanwhile, is deployed strategically as in the narrative to expose the naïve and illusory nature of the aesthetic hedonism of its protagonists. This chapter further argues that Fitzgerald’s reliance on fin-de-siècle tropes should not be understood as anomalous or derivative but, rather, that it situates The Beautiful and Damned in a broader “new decadent” literary movement within American modernism.

In the late fifth century BCE, traditional religious beliefs and practices were being reconsidered from a variety of intellectual fields and viewpoints, but perhaps most vigorously interrogated by the Sophists. Although ancient Greek religion was characteristically open to change and local variety, the Sophists and contemporaneous thinkers put this flexibility to the test, as ancient reports of trials against intellectuals on account of their religious views attest. Anaxagoras and Socrates, in different ways, offer novel perspectives on what the divine is and is not; Protagoras in one way and the Derveni author in another question traditional certainties about our access to and knowledge of the divine; Prodicus, Democritus, and the so-called Sisyphus fragment provide psychological and/or sociological explanations of religious beliefs; and characters in plays by Euripides and Aristophanes deny outright the existence of the gods and, with that, the existence of traditional moral values.

In order to tell the literary history of “progressive liberalism” in the twentieth-century American novel, this chapter traces the career of the word “liberalism” from progressivism’s synonym during the Progressive Era to its antonym ever since the Cold War. This conceptual history has underwritten not only the history of American political thought, but also that of the American novel in the twentieth century. It was in the literary imagination – from the realist and, even more crucially, the naturalist novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the multicultural novel of the late twentieth century – that the changing meanings of “progressive” and “liberal” were developed and tested. By the same token, these political categories provided a vocabulary for politically placing and adjudicating individual works and even whole genres and literary developments – efforts that became increasingly central to literary studies as the discipline became self-consciously politicized. In particular, the chapter pays attention to canonical novels by Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Toni Morrison.

This chapter examines the literary left over the course of the twentieth century. Beginning with an analysis of key nineteenth-century literary antecedents to later socialist and communist novels, it then focuses on early twentieth-century leftist novels drawn from realism, naturalism, and utopian socialism. The chapter pays special attention to influential fictional works by Upton Sinclair, notably The Jungle, and the many subsequent leftist novels spawned by Sinclair’s success. It surveys unique contributions to the literary left made by Black novelists such as Claude McKay and Richard Wright and by feminist writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin. The chapter ends with a brief analysis of post-1960s leftist writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson, who harnessed science fiction for revolutionary ends.

Chapter 2 reads John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy in the context of cybernetics theorists Norbert Wiener’s and Claude Shannon’s contradictory definitions of information (Wiener’s theories align the concept with pattern, while Shannon instead describes it as a measure of randomness). Love argues that Dos Passos’s trilogy integrates both sides of this opposition in ways that are important to our understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of early twentieth-century cybernetic thinking. Focusing on the novels’ “Newsreel” sections, she illustrates how this technology – in both form and content, as well as broader industry practices – epitomizes the logic of cybernetic information. By incorporating a literary version of this media form into his novels, Dos Passos demonstrates how predictable patterns jostle with random chance as catalysts for change and progress in the United States. This interdisciplinary pairing shows (a) how cybernetics theories can help us understand the ideological work that texts like Dos Passos’s novels and newsreel productions undertake, and (b) how modernist literature encouraged readers to develop strategies for cybernetic thinking.

This chapter presents an overview of Plato’s moral realism. The metaphysical framework of Plato’s moral realism is explained. This framework’s fundamental principle is the superordinate Idea of the Good, which is both the anchor for moral realism and the unhypothetical first principle of all. Thus, for Plato normativity is woven into metaphysics (Section 1.1). A taxonomy of types of moral realism is provided within which Plato’s moral realism can be situated (Section 1.2). Plato’s moral realism is compared to versions of antimoral realism and naturalistic versions of moral realism (Section 1.3). The priority of “good” to “right” in Plato is explained (Section 1.4). The priority of “good” to “value” is further explained. The universality of the Good goes beyond objectivity and is intended to preclude the possibility that “good” and “good for me” can possibly conflict (Section 1.5).

Poetic, literary and philosophical dreams of automata in the ancient world tended to focus on humanoid or at least mammalian entities. Yet when automata are realised in practice, they are considerably different in quality.This chapter explores the gap between the automata of ancient fantasy and reality, in terms of their physical nature and the concepts and categories with which they were implicated (statues, slaves, theatre, the divine).  It asks how far the sense of wonder that is associated with automata changed over time and how far it (ever) depended on a naturalistic or realistic reproduction of the body, human or animal. I argue that although the earliest known automata seem to have made gestures towards naturalism, both in terms of movement and other activities (if not in how these effects were realised), interest rapidly moved towards mechanical wonder (as Hero of Alexandria suggests) and theatrical wonder rather than any kind of naturalistic wonder. Perversely, the more technically sophisticated ancient automata became, the less the interest in mimicking human or animal bodies. The explanation may be sought partly in the non-naturalistic nature of ancient mimesis and partly in the changing status and sophistication of ancient mechanics. As a result, the path from ancient automata to modern notions of the robot or android is not at all straightforward.

Chapter 1 considers the fear of atheism that gripped early modern thinkers, assessing its nature and extent and seeking to explain its rationale; in the course of this, its association with trends in the thought of the period such as naturalism, secularism and Deism is considered, as is its supposed link with immoralism. The chapter also asserts that the few well-documented examples of actual atheists that are known from the period were characterised by the ‘assurance’ that they showed in propagating their views, in contrast to the doubts suffered by Christian believers, a point that is illustrated by recourse to the history of emotions. The remainder of the chapter summarises the content of the rest of the book, paying particular attention to the Cerne Abbas enquiry of 1594 and to the apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and of John Eliot in Edinburgh in 1694.