Naturalizing the Human or Humanizing Nature: Science, Nature and the Supernatural

The present paper challenges the narrow scientistic conception of Nature that underlies current projects of naturalization involving, say, evaluative or intentional discourse. It is more plausible to hold that science provides only a partial characterization of the natural world. The author considers McDowell's articulation of a more liberal naturalism, one which recognizes autonomous normative facts about reasons, meanings and values, as genuine constituents of Nature on a more liberal conception of it. Several critics have claimed that this account is vitiated by the threat of supernaturalism. Responsiveness to normative facts is, it is argued, a phenomenological datum that we have good reason to take at face value. The paper traces the source of the supernaturalist objection to a misreading of McDowell's perceptual analogy with respect to value and a related failing to clearly distinguish physical and logical notions of an object.