Imagination, logic, & life

Here is an email I wrote for a group several years ago, just retrieved:

10 February 2005

Imagination & logic, the shape of life & the shape of thought

While scooting about town yesterday, I ran several complete narratives through my head. Typing, however, is much slower, and I've been burning all my candles at all ends, so I'll have to content myself with summarizing what I'm not going to say.

(1) A narrative tentatively titled "Street Life Monadology" is an autobiographical review of the summer and fall of 1979, illustrating the juxtaposition of philosophical reflection and everyday life, and sometimes the unplanned coincidences between the two.  However, except for the entertainment value, I see no advantage in posting it here, because there are no generalizable conclusions to be drawn from it. My aim would have been to show the close relation between philosophizing and everyday life and my own driving motivations of the time, but in fact this is not the story that will do it, and the appropriate stories to be told would require even greater effort to reconstruct.

(2) I wanted to write up my perceptions of the effects of the philosophical culture of analytical philosophy on people I've known, to illustrate its debilitating effect on imagination and creativity. Which is not to say that I disavow the specific products that issue from this work—as much of it is stuff that interested me in the past—but I'm interested in what could be called philosophical culture, or the milieu that molds minds in a particular way, which is where I see the problem. This is by no means to validate its dishonest and hypocritical competitor, irrationalism. In any event, each is indispensable to the other.

(3) One problem with the association of life and philosophy is the unavoidability of being held hostage to a limited set of available ideas which at some point in time are attractive because they resonate so well with what is going on in the times, and individually. Only with time, more knowledge, and good fortune, is it possible to see that the shapes of both life and thought at an earlier stage of development were contoured in different ways than one suspected at the time. This is one reason to be wary.

(4) While I thought I saw the handwriting on the wall in the late '70s, as I always think I do, I could not see the shape of thought from a sufficiently wide angle. I only met Aant Elzinga, who does historical science studies in Sweden, in the 1980s, in another stage of my existence, and he gave me a few of his papers. But I didn't absorb the lessons even then. I wish I had read the following paper back in 1978 when he wrote it, and when I had no clue about the perspective contained therein, but he only sent it to me two years ago:

The Man of Science in a World of Crisis: A Plea for a Two-Pronged Attack on Positivism and Irrationalism.

________________

"The hidden harmony is better than the visible." — Heraclitus

James Schmidt on Max Horkheimer & Dialectic of Enlightenment

Originally having read the first two articles in January 2007, I blogged about them on my Studies in a Dying Culture blog a couple months later, but only briefly. Since then, the URLs changed, and I now offer some additional observations. I subsequently address the third and to me the most exciting of the articles on the context in which Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason were generated.

Schmidt, James. "Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment," Social Research, Vol. 65, Issue 4, Winter 1998. Preprint.

James Schmidt reviews the genesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment as Philosophical Fragments, Marcuse’s incomprehension, the authors’ views of the debasement of language (exemplified in Hitler's radio addresses), the parallels with Hegel’s phenomenology, and the logic of what became the title essay. Schmidt finds D of E unique in comparison with Counter-Enlightenment literature.

50 years on one cannot properly assess D of E without reconstructing the process and context in which it was composed, including how the initial collection of fragments became more of a real book, and the excision of explicit references to Marxism by Adorno. In this and other essays Schmidt takes pains to distinguish Horkheimer's view from other attacks on the Enlightenment and reversion to Counter-Enlightenment ideologies in the 1940s. Horkheimer opposed the reinstitution of banckward-looking philosophies such as Neo-Thomism which were gaining momentum in the USA. A key point of D of E is a complementarity often overlooked: not only does Enlightenment become myth, but myth, already from ancient times, becomes Enlightenment. First, there is magic, then myth, then Enlightenment, and with the ultimate stripping of all intrinsic meaning, we are back to myth and magic. (Horkheimer attempted to keep in touch with one academic discipline in this period -- anthropology -- in line with his interest in magic and myth.) However, the goal of Dialectic of Enlightenment was to rescue the Enlightenment from the dead end to which it had allegedly attained. The planned sequel to this work, a positive theory of dialectics, was never written.

Schmidt, James. "The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America," New German Critique, no. 100, Winter 2007, pp. 47-76.

The Eclipse of Reason is often treated as a footnote to Dialectic of Enlightenment. It was initially greeted with enthusiasm by Leo Lowenthal, but Horkheimer grew to harbor serious doubts about it. The troubled relationship between the Institute for Social Research and Columbia University's Sociology Dept. and a concern over the popularity of Franz Neumann also figure in. The Eclipse of Reason has its origin in a lecture series Horkheimer delivered at Columbia in 1944, after Lowenthal sifted through the proposed topics. The differences between the book and the lectures are detailed. Horkheimer also had difficulties grappling with the philosophy of Dewey, not to mention processing his ideas in English for an American audience. Horkheimer's anxiety about the book's reception proved to be founded. It received an enthusiastic review from then-prominent American philosopher Arthur E. Murphy. On the other hand, Glenn Negley gave the book a blistering review. John R. Everett was not so nasty, but still gave a thumbs down to the book, particularly criticizing Horkheimer's take on American naturalism. The book ended up in a Gimbel's sale in 1952 for 59 cents, having failed to make an impact.

Schmidt, James. The “New Failure of Nerve,” The Eclipse of Reason, and the Critique of Enlightenment in New York and Los Angeles, 1940-1947. Munich, Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, May 2011.

Here we find an instance in which intellectual traditions usually examined separately come together.  One aspect of the relevant intellectual history is the surge of irrationalism and the revolt against modernity and Enlightenment reason that became fashionable in the USA in the 1940s. (The popularity of Kierkegaard is part of this story, though not treated here. See George Cotkin's Existential America.  I also need to write a screed about how Richard Wright's use of Kierkegaard was entirely opposite to the trend.) Other intellectual histories focus on the conservative project of Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago, which involved also the creation of the Great Books enterprise, a grandiose and successful marketing phenomenon though maybe not so successful in the goal of turning the clock back. It is also well documented that a coalition of left and liberal intellectuals were united in opposing this Counter-Enlightenment trend. Sidney Hook, known to historians of American philosophy and secular humanists, dubbed this disturbing retreat "the new failure of nerve".

There are also histories of the Partisan Review cohort and the "New York intellectuals".  Dwight Mcdonald was part of this history, as one of these intellectuals, a prominent anti-Stalinist of the left, and a critic of mass culture.

And then there is the Frankfurt School, in this period in exile in the USA.  All of these histories come together in this essay.

Adorno reported to Horkheimer of a meeting with Macdonald, who waxed enthusiastic about the Frankfurters' work, at the moment in which he was embroiled in a struggle with the editors of Partisan Review. Horkheimer followed the 1943 "New Failure of Nerve" dispute and even planned an intervention that was never completed, but this fed into his work on the Enlightenment. Adler scapegoated contemporary positivists and secular liberals as the intellectuals responsible for Nazism, opposed to the American way of life. Jacques Maritain and Carlton J. H. Hayes echoed this line. And this was part of a whole trend linking Enlightenment rationalism to nihilism and Germany's fascist fate.

Given the extreme statements made in Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is easy to marshal this work into the service of reactionary thought, however the book work is transhistorical in scope and not much about the actual historical period known as the Enlightenment.

What tends to be most memorable about Dialectic of Enlightenment are those pithy formulations (most infamously, the three words: “Enlightenment is totalitarian”) that would appear to confirm what readers are ready to assume: that the foundations of the Nazi terror were laid by the Enlightenment. It is all too easy to miss the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno never draw the conclusion to which the perversity thesis typically leads: the admonition that, since efforts at enlightenment yield produce perverse results, the project should be abandoned. In intent, if not always in execution, Dialectic of Enlightenment pursues an argument of a rather different sort.  As Adorno argued in Minima Moralia, “Not least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment.” Such a strategy is not without its risks and, in their attempt to thwart the perverse effects of an enlightenment gone awry, Horkheimer and Adorno produced a book that yielded a perverse effect of its own: a legion of readers who assume that the book constitutes a rejection of “the Enlightenment project” root and branch, rather than an attempt to understand how enlightenment might be rescued from what it threatened to become.

In Horkheimer's correspondence with Hutchins, one sees a bemoaning of a decline since the Renaissance, which sounds familiar to those familiar with the argument that Enlightenment breeds nihilism. But:

On the one hand, their point was that enlightenment falls back into myth:  all of the substantive principles that generations of enlighteners had sought to oppose to mythology turn out to be no less mythical than the traditional prejudices that they sought to dismantle.  Yet, on the other hand, myth is already enlightenment: it already represents an effort to understand nature, rather than simply mimic it and, hence, already represents a contribution to the process of enlightenment.

Horkheimer had earlier published his essay “The End of Reason,” according to which the decline of individuality is mirrored in the history of philosophy, wherein its anti-metaphysical thrust ultimately vaporizes reason itself. Horkheimer and Adorno were also engaged with Freud and the study of myth.  But if myth is the genesis of enlightenment, then what did myth replace?  The answer is: magic. Hence Horkheimer and Adorno engaged the concept of mimesis, which was treated in Walter Benjamin's work. Horkheimer also studied sociologist Marcel Mauss’ work on magic, and absorbed a swath of sociological and anthropological literature.

Some of the difficulties of this maddeningly dense [first] chapter begin to dissipate once it is recognized that the fulcrum around which it turns has less to do with the opposition between myth and enlightenment — an opposition that had been a standard trope among conservative cultural critics in the 1920s — than with a wildly speculative philosophical anthropology that sketches an account of the development of human relationships with nature in which magical/mimetic interactions are replaced by those efforts at conceptualization and categorization that are fundamental both to mythological forms of thought and to modern, scientific approaches to nature. Drawing on Benjamin’s discussion of the weakening of the “mimetic faculty,” Mauss’ account of magical practices, and Caillois’ discussion of mimetic forms of adaptation in the insect world, Dialectic of Enlightenment repeatedly invokes what Horkheimer characterized in one of the notes appended to the book as a “hidden history” in which mute, bodily reactions to the overwhelming force of nature were gradually channeled into magical practices that controlled and ritualized these spontaneous forms mimetic adaptation.

The process of enlightenment from mimesis to myth to demythologization is driven by fear, so the argument goes. Note that this argument precludes any return to a premodern past.

Meanwhile, Sidney Hook, John Dewey, and Ernest Nagel were busy defending naturalism from the accusations of the philosophical right wing. Hook led the charge, with a mighty powerful argument. Norbert Guterman, a Polish emigre, defended Kierkegaard. He 'suggested that those “modern ‘existentialist’ philosophers” who claimed to be Kierkegaard’s heirs had, in fact, far more in common with the “rationalists” they claimed to denounce'. The arguments of other debaters are summarized.

Macdonald was already antagonistic to Hook and company, accusing Hook of failing to understand the why of the “rising tide of obscurantism”.  Macdonald saw the draining of meaning as a result of historical and social forces, contrasting the ideological struggle of World War II with that of the Napoleonic wars. As Schmidt puts it: 'While the armies of revolutionary France sought to “politicize the struggle,” the forces engaged in the battle against Hitler’s armies made every effort to play down the ideological stakes'. I think this aspect of war propaganda is worth looking into. Macdonald drew a distinction between the affirmative values of the rising bourgeoisie and the draining of meaning and value by the contemporary bourgeoisie, intent on preserving capitalism sans the assertive progressive values of the early bourgeoisie. And here one finds Macdonald's sour view of mass culture. Not surprising that Adorno, author of the landmark essay on the culture industry, would enthuse over Macdonald.

We see from citations from Horkheimer's letters in 1943 and 1944 that Horkheimer intended to enter the "new failure of nerve" debate, while immersed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment project, which nevertheness did not expand in scope from 1944 to its formal publication in 1947. Some of what Horkheimer was writing found its way into Eclipse of Reason.  Horkheimer labeled Hook, Dewey, and Nagel as positivists, and seems to have been more sympathetic to their opponents, though he did recognize that they were fighting a rearguard action. Horkheimer argued that the neopositivists could be hoisted by the same petard as the neo-Thomists. Horkheimer's schema, which you will find in Eclipse of Reason, involves the question of "objective reason", which has disappeared by the exclusive modern focus on "subjective reason". Schmidt continues:

If science is to serve as a bulwark against obscurantism — a stance that Horkheimer sees as fundamental to “the great tradition of humanism and the Enlightenment” — it is incumbent on it to provide a principle that can serve as “the criterion for the true nature of science.”  But instead, all that is offered is a set of “empirical procedures” whose claim to truth rests on nothing more than the “dogmatic criteria of scientific success.” In its “preference for uncomplicated words and sentences that can be grouped at a glance,” positivism falls prey to the “anti-intellectual, anti-humanistic tendencies apparent in the development of modern language, as well as cultural life in general.”  Its failure to offer any resistance to these tendencies suggests that it, too, suffers from a “failure of nerve.”

As Horkheimer himself admitted, his own project was incomplete and subject to similar criticism, and he was projecting a follow-up “positive theory of dialectics,” which never came to fruition.

Ruth Nanda Anshen's praise for Eclipse of Reason drew a rejoinder from Horkheimer, emphasizing that he does not advocate a pseudo-religion or a return to myth. ("Objective reason" in this argument is equated with a return to outmoded metaphysical views.) Here is a quote directly from Horkheimer:

She leans heavily on pseudo-religious prestige values and boldly proclaims her belief in some of the most commonplace, universally accepted ideas.  My intentions are precisely the opposite. In spite of my critique of “subjective reason” and its relapse into a second mythology – a critique bearing only a superficial resemblance to certain antipathies nourished by Dr. Anshen – I have never advocated a return to an even more mythological “objective reason” borrowed from history.  … I have attacked enlightenment in the spirit of enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

But Horkheimer's protest was in vain. For the intent of Dialectic of Enlightenment is too often and too easily misunderstood.

Schmidt's essays are invaluable in interpreting the full meaning of this landmark work of Horkheimer and Adorno, which was quite novel in its time. All things considered, though, I still maintain that the thesis of this work is false, and that only the seminal chapter on the culture industry is worth salvaging.

See also:

Jeffrey Herf on Reactionary Modernism & Dialectic of Enlightenment

R. Dumain's Critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment

Why Stephen Bond left the "skeptics"

WHY I AM NO LONGER A SKEPTIC by Stephen Bond, Stephensplatz blog, 28 Aug 2011

While I share the impetus toward derision of the skeptics movement, for most of the same reasons, this hyperbolic argument is deficient in certain respects.The author is more philosophically perspicacious than 98% of the people who could be counted as having some relation to the atheist/humanist/skeptics movement, but the downward pull of bourgeois thought, even left bourgeois thought, is difficult to resist. This fellow is on the right track, but his reasoning and philosophical-methodological perspective need tightening up.

(1) The overblown accusations of sexism & racism, both in the way specific examples are addressed and the phenomenon is generalized to the entire movement, detract from the argument.

 (2) Neoliberalism: the author is missing something here: the way neoliberalism impacts skepticism is not that they are all neoliberals, but that neoliberalism has also pulled the left to the right.

(3) Feminism, etc.: the author doesn't see that bourgeois feminism and diversity management are also deficient & affected by the neoliberal order.

(4) The treatment of metaphor in science & its improper (and proper?) uses is badly handled. What other sources of knowledge other than science could be more useful are not specified. Had the author moved to the question of social theory & ideology critique, he would have done better.

(5) Politics: while the author is correct about pseudoscience (such as racist pseudoscience) flourishing in liberal democracies, he is rather vague about the relation between science & politics, other than the assertion than science is necessarily political.

(6) The author does not adequately address the relationship between liberal abstract ideals & their realization or non-realization in actual societies.

(7) Skeptics issues: note comments on alternative medicine, sociobiology, linguistics, economics. Aside from linguistics, I'm inclined to agree with the author. He could have said more about economics, since Michael Shermer is one of the leading purveyors of pseudoscience in this area.

(8) Harmlessness of paranormal superstition: this was my position in the '70s, but no longer. As for ridiculing the disenfranchised, their superstitious mindset is ripe for the pickings by fascism.

(9) Skepticism as dogmatism? Of course.

(10) Positivism: this treatment needs treatment. Positivism (in a loose sense) really is a problem. The fawning over every statement by Dawkins, the scientism of Harris, or the authoritative pronouncements of Hawking on the death of philosophy, are all indicators of how deeply uncritical & positivist in tendency is the whole atheist movement. Science, scientific method, etc. repeatedly endlessly, along with the obliteration of social theory & philosophy: this is how they do.

(11) Author's disillusionment: he had illusions in the first place. His were not mine.

Naturalism & Materialism

See also my original post with extensive commentary on Freethought Forum, 16 February 2007.

The terminology of philosophy is fraught with ambiguities, multiple meanings, and meaning conflicts. The battles fought over and within philosophical terminology incorporate the battles of history and ideology. Naturalism is one of these terms. For our purposes, we can go with the relevant Wikipedia encyclopedia entries:

Naturalism (philosophy)

Metaphysical naturalism

The former article is about methodological naturalism, that is, the methodological nature of the sciences. This figures into legal and other battles over the teaching of evolution. The latter is a stronger claim, such as one will find in the work of Richard Dawkins. Atheists and many secular humanists adhere to both. The scientific establishment of necessity embraces the first and shies away from the second.

Naturalism, however, is not by itself crystal clear as a designator of philosophical positions. It covers a multitude of philosophical positions, which themselves may compete or overlap: pragmatism, positivism, materialism, scientific realism . . .

One way of approaching the issue here is to delve into the usage of another philosophical term, materialism, as this constitutes a prime example of the politics of ideas. Materialism is customarily employed in a very restrictive way in Anglo-American philosophy, to refer to the mind-body problem alone. Note the narrow definition that introduces the Wikipedia entry on materialism. Physicalism seems to have been a prevailing view among the logical positivists. (I think of Otto Neurath’s questionable essay on physicalism and sociology.) The history of materialism, is, oddly, not so easy to reconstruct, perhaps because of the prejudices against it. In the 19th century F. A. Lange attempted to write a history of materialism in order to oppose it. The very word seems to have become taboo even among those whose position is basically that. Partly, this may be because the Marxists seemed to be the only ones to have kept materialism going, although I think the taboo, which goes back thousands of years, is probably not reducible to a more recent association of political radicalism. In the USA, “naturalism” was much more acceptable, but there are a number of vagaries at work, as a number of underlying positions may employ this terminology, as is also the case with “realism”. Just to take one example, Marvin Farber used the term “naturalism”, but finally copped to “materialism”, admitting that philosophers were too scared to use the word. Perhaps the FBI’s interest in this matter, with or without overt political connections, helps to explain why. However, it would seem that much of the scientific realism that arose in dissatisfaction with positivism (Mario Bunge apparently fits into this category) is basically materialist.

David H. Price, using FBI files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, in detailing the decades-long investigation of the Marxist philosophical journal Science & Society from the 1940s to the 1960s, concluded that the FBI apparently viewed Marxist theorizing as almost as dangerous to national security as outright Marxist activism.

But during the postwar 1940s and throughout the 1950s the FBI viewed most philosophical links to Marxism as threats to their vision of “Americanism.” During the early Cold War most forms of materialist analysis were seen by the FBI as threats to national security . . . Thus the FBI reacted with strong concern upon reading the essays of Bernhard Stern, Elmer Barnes and others affiliated with the early years of Science & Society in the book Philosophy for the Future (Sellars, et al., 1949):

They are day in and day out influencing the minds of countless youths. Their influence goes beyond the classroom. They are also writers issuing books and articles designed to influence educated and articulate adults in positions of importance. There can be little doubt that these materialists are subtly preparing the minds of at least a percentage of those reached by them for the acceptance of communism. Further, they are preparing a greater percentage of educated minds to be sympathetic or soft on communism. . . . It is not unlikely that the majority of the educated enemies of the Bureau who are regularly attacking or opposing us in one form or another are philosophic materialists. And, they are not decreasing in numbers. Philosophy for the Future is our problem of the future. (WFO 100-FBI Office Memorandum, 7/28/57).

“Materialism” aside, it is also important to note that the pragmatic naturalist Sidney Hook, a hero to some in the secular humanist movement, was a major culprit in the McCarthyite persecution of American philosophers, which among other effects may have changed the course of American philosophy.

Roy Wood Sellars, a co-editor of the 1949 anthology Philosophy for the Future (and, not incidentally, author of the first Humanist Manifesto), in his 1927 essay “Why Naturalism and Not Materialism” drew a functional distinction between materialism and naturalism.

Materialism is distinctly an ontological theory, a theory of the stuff of reality. Its polar opposite is usually taken to be mentalism of some kind. Naturalism, on the other hand, is a cosmological position; its opposite is supernaturalism in the larger meaning of that term. I mean that naturalism takes nature in a definite way as identical with reality, as self-sufficient and as the whole of reality. And by nature is meant the space-time-causal system which is studied by science and in which our lives are passed. The whole nature of nature may not be exhaustively known, but its location and general characteristics come under the above categories.

And:

Another weakness of materialism was its whole-hearted identification of itself with the principles of elementary mechanics. It was naively scientific. We may call this species of materialism reductive materialism. . . . By its very principle evolutionary materialism is opposed to reductive materialism. It is not finalistic, or teleological, in the old sense . . . but it does not hold that relations in nature are external and that things are machines of atomic complexity. Organization and wholes are genuinely significant.

These passages are singled out by Jaegwon Kim, who states, as Sellars himself complained, that Sellars has been unjustly neglected. (Some of my sources suggest that W.V.O. Quine is the major American point of reference for naturalism.) Sellars was a central participant in American philosophical trends in the early part of the 20th century. His essays and autobiographical material compare the competing positions of the time.

Apparently Sellars changed his mind about materialism, for by 1944 he poses the question “Is Naturalism Enough?” and finds that it is not, contrasting materialism to the vagaries of the then current pragmatism, which under Dewey and Hook also claimed the mantle of naturalism.

In atheist, freethought, and secular humanist circles in the United States, whenever a fundamental ontological position is stated at all, it is usually naturalism and not materialism. I would imagine another popular term is scientific realism, which implies a naturalist or materialist position. Atheists (freethinkers, etc.) no more hold to a single philosophical position than do philosophers, and even with respect to “atheism” hold to a variety of positions, reflected to a certain extent in their own variants of preferred terms, not to mention the less committed position of agnosticism. They also vary among themselves as to their level of tolerance of beliefs on various relevant issues. (Interestingly, the questionnaire used to create personal profiles on the Secularity web site queries perspective members in some detail beliefs regarding deities, supernatural entities, the paranormal, and spirituality.) Then there is the question of common goals. After all, agitation for church-state (religion-government) separation encompasses a much broader spectrum of people than those to be found within the atheist/freethought orbit. Within the freethought orbit, while some individuals and groups have been extremely militant about unambiguous definitions, others are much more tolerant of diverse positions as long as they roughly fall within the “family”. Arguments over philosophical coherence and consistency have their place, depending on the nature and purpose of a given discussion.

American Atheists, in its membership application, grounds atheism in materialism:

Materialism declares that the cosmos is devoid of immanent conscious purpose; that it is governed by its own inherent, immutable, and impersonal laws; that there is no supernatural interference in human life; that humankind—finding their resources within themselves—can and must create their own destiny.

I noticed this two decades ago and was impressed by this explicit philosophical declaration. There are not only various designations for nonbelievers—atheist, freethinker, rationalist, agnostic, secular humanist, etc.—there are also various designations for philosophical positions—materialism, naturalism, etc. . . . and skepticism.

I have a fundamental problem with adoption of the term skepticism. As represented in magazines like Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer, the term is applied to paranormal and other claims deemed disreputable by these proponents of reputable science. I object to the term because some of the individuals involved themselves and their knowledge claims merit skeptical scrutiny, but more generally because “skepticism” is also a philosophical position which I would not want to adopt or see confused with the specific meaning adopted by the “skeptical” movement, which has ties to secular humanist and atheist circles.

Otherwise, my own philosophical position and terminological preferences aside, I maintain that for our purposes, the functional distinction that matters is naturalism vs. supernaturalism, one which works very well and now has precedent in court cases involving the teaching of evolution, and so I conclude that naturalism suits our purpose. I will continue to use naturalism as a reference point as I pursue questions of skepticism, scientism, and scientific method.

REFERENCES

American Atheists membership application.

Augustine, Keith. A Defense of Naturalism. 2001.

Bhaskar, Roy. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979.

Chrucky, Andrew. Bibliography of Roy Wood Sellars. 1997.

Dankov, Evlogi. “Doubt and Atheism,” translated by Olga Cankova (1990) & Ralph Dumain (2000).

Dumain, Ralph. American Philosophy Study Guide (online).

Dumain, Ralph. Vienna Circle, Karl Popper, Frankfurt School, Marxism, McCarthyism & American Philosophy: Selected Bibliography. 2004- .

Farber, Marvin. Naturalism and Subjectivism (Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas, 1959), Chapter 1, esp. pp. 3–5.

Farber, Marvin. The Search for an Alternative: Philosophical Perspectives of Subjectivism and Marxism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), Chapter 9, From the Perspective of Materialism, pp. 216–238.

Forrest, Barbara. “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection,” Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 2000), pp. 7–29.

Fritzman, J.M. “Almeder’s Implicit Scientism,” Philosophia, vol. 33, nos. 1–4, December 2005, pp. 275–296.

Kim, Jaegwon. “The American Origins of Philosophical Naturalism,” in: Philosophy in America at the Turn of the Century (APA Centennial Supplement, Journal of Philosophical Research) (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2003), pp. 83–98.

Manicas, Peter T. “Naturalism and Subjectivism: Philosophy for the Future?”. 2000.

McCumber, John. The Honor Roll: American Philosophers Professionally Injured During the McCarthy Era.

Naturalism.Org, Center for Naturalism web site.

Neurath, Otto. “Sociology and Physicalism” [orig. 1931/2], translated by Morton Magnus & Ralph Raico, in: Logical Positivism, A.J. Ayer, ed. (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 282–317.

Nielsen, Kai. “Agnosticism,” in: Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), Vol. 1, pp. 17–27.

Parsons, Keith M. “Defending Naturalism,” Philo, vol. 3, no. 2, Fall-Winter 2000.

Philo, philosophy journal devoted to naturalism.

Philosophy for the Future: The Quest of Modern Materialism, edited by Roy Wood Sellars, V.J. McGill, Marvin Farber. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949.

Popkin, Richard. The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2003.

Price, David H. “The FBI and Science & Society,” Science & Society, Winter 2004–2005.

Reisch, George. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, April 2005.

Secularity (web site).

Sellars, Roy Wood. “Humanist Manifesto” (Drafter and co-signer), The New Humanist, vol. 6, No. 3 (May-June, 1933), pp. 58–61.

_______________. “Is Naturalism Enough?”, in Principles of Emergent Realism: Philosophical Essays, compiled and edited by W. Preston Warren (St. Louis, MO: W. H. Green, 1970), pp. 140–150. Original publication: R. W. Sellars, Journal of Philosophy, XLI (1944), pp. 533‑544.

_______________. “The New Materialism,” in A History of Philosophical Systems, edited by Vergilius Ferm (Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adamas & Co., 1965 [orig. 1950]), Chapter 33, pp. 418–428.

_______________. Principles of Emergent Realism: Philosophical Essays, compiled and edited by W. Preston Warren. St. Louis, MO: W. H. Green, 1970. See Foreword, v-ix.

_______________. Reflections on American Philosophy From Within. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969.

_______________. “Why Naturalism and Not Materialism,” Philosophical Review (36) (1927), pp. 216–225. Reprinted in Principles of Emergent Realism: Philosophical Essays, ed. W. Preston Warren (St. Louis, MO: W. H. Green, 1970).]

Warren, W. Preston. Roy Wood Sellars: Philosopher of Religious Humanism (1883–1973). 1975. With links to other materials.

Wikipedia. See Agnosticism, Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, Logical positivism, Mario Bunge, Materialism, Metaphysical naturalism, Naturalism (philosophy), Physicalism, Sidney Hook, Skeptic (magazine), Skeptical Inquirer, Skepticism, Willard Van Orman Quine.