School #12
Naturalism
Quine, Dewey
Naturalism holds that everything that exists is part of the natural world, and that the methods of the natural sciences are the only reliable path to knowledge — supernatural explanations are excluded as a matter of principle. W. V. O. Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951) and 'Word and Object' (1960) established the modern form: philosophy is continuous with science, ontological commitments are determined by what our best scientific theories quantify over, and the boundary between analytic and synthetic truths dissolves. John Dewey's 'Experience and Nature' (1925) grounded an earlier naturalism in the continuity of human experience with the rest of nature — mind, value, and meaning are natural phenomena, not imports from a supernatural realm. Post-quantum naturalism accepts irreducible indeterminism as a natural fact: not all events are fully determined by prior states, and this openness is built into the fabric of physical reality rather than requiring any non-natural cause.
Worldview
The naturalist sees a world that is magnificent precisely because it requires no miracles. Everything that exists — from galaxies to human consciousness — is part of the natural order, explicable in principle by natural laws and accessible through the methods of science. There is no supernatural realm, no hidden dimension of spirit or meaning beyond the physical. This orientation produces a distinctive blend of intellectual awe and sobriety: the naturalist is genuinely moved by the beauty and complexity of the universe while insisting that wonder does not require mystery, and that explanation does not diminish the thing explained. The natural world is enough — it does not need to be supplemented by something beyond itself to be worthy of reverence. The framework classifies this as None: agency runs entirely through natural causation, with no personal deity, cosmic ordering principle, or operative spirits over and above the physical order. The framework reads this as None for moral authority: empirical method governs what counts as known, but no source is recognized as normatively authoritative over how to act in the way Scripture, Tradition, Reason, or Experience function for the other clusters.
Moral Implications
Naturalist ethics grounds moral reasoning in the natural facts of human and animal well-being, evolutionary history, and social cooperation rather than in divine command or transcendent moral law. Moral norms are understood as evolved and culturally refined strategies for navigating social life, which means they are revisable in light of new evidence about what promotes or hinders flourishing. This produces a strongly empirical approach to ethics: the naturalist asks what actually reduces suffering and what actually promotes cooperation, treating moral claims as hypotheses subject to correction. The exclusion of supernatural sanctions does not leave morality groundless but redirects its foundations to the only ground there is — the natural world of sentient beings.
Practical Implications
Naturalism is the implicit ontology of modern science, medicine, and engineering. It underwrites evidence-based medicine, secular education, environmental science, and the separation of church and state. The naturalist approach to technology is cautiously optimistic: scientific inquiry, guided by naturalistic assumptions, has produced extraordinary practical benefits, from vaccines to renewable energy. Environmentally, naturalism supports conservation biology and ecological science as the authoritative basis for policy, rejecting both mystical and nihilistic attitudes toward the natural world in favor of informed stewardship grounded in the best available evidence.
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I. Time
Time is substantival and infinite — a real, objective feature of the natural world. Post-quantum naturalism accepts that time's flow may involve irreducible indeterminism at the quantum level. Time is continuous, linear, and uni-directional, governed by natural laws alone without any supernatural cause or telos.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Linear
Dimensionality: One
Direction: Uni-directional
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II. Space
Space is substantival, infinite, and curved — an objective feature of the natural world described by general relativity. It is local: all interactions are mediated through spatial proximity at finite speed. Space is three-dimensional at the macroscopic scale, though deeper theories may reveal additional structure.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Curvature: Curved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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III. Matter
Matter is substantival and finite — it is the fundamental constituent of the natural world, fully governed by natural laws. Conservation is strict: matter is neither created nor destroyed. All material phenomena, including consciousness, are natural processes requiring no supernatural explanation.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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IV. Observer
The observer is a natural entity — a biological organism embedded in the present moment of a causal universe, occupying one physical location in the natural world. Consciousness is a product of complex neural processes, not a supernatural addition. Direct perception is immediate and limited, but the scientific method extends knowledge far beyond what any individual can see, hear, or touch. Through science and cultural transmission, knowledge accumulates across generations into a vast, growing body of understanding. The observer is passive in the sense that reality unfolds according to natural law regardless of observation, yet multiple observers collaborate to build an increasingly accurate picture of the natural world.
Attributes
Time Instance: Single
Space Instance: Single
Extent of Knowledge: Mediated
Retainment of Knowledge: Partial
Physicality: Embodied
Agency: Passive
Number: Plural
Metaphysical Agency: None
Moral Authority: None
Theological Method: N/A
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V. Energy
Energy is substantival and finite — a real, natural quantity governed by the laws of thermodynamics. Conservation is strict: no supernatural creation or destruction of energy is possible. Dispersibility is irreversible, following the natural direction of entropy increase.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dispersibility: Irreversible
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VI. Information
Information is a high-level pattern in physical processes — real and causally relevant but not a separate substance. It emerges from the arrangement of matter and energy and is conserved because the laws of physics preserve information content. The framework distinguishes scales: information is conserved at the cosmic scale because physical law (quantum unitarity, thermodynamic bookkeeping) preserves the universe's total informational state, but non-conserved at the personal-identity scale — when the brain that carries a pattern decoheres at death, no soul or self survives.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Emergent
Cosmic Conservation: Conserved
Personal Conservation: Non-conserved
Granularity: Continuous
Experiments This School Responds To (147)
Mary's Room
Mary gains no new *fact*, only a new mode of access to facts she already knew — the "ability hypothesis" (Nemirow, Lewis) treats knowing-what-red-is-like as …
The Chinese Room
The "systems reply": the man-with-rulebook is the wrong unit of analysis; understanding is a property of the whole room (operator + rulebook + paper + …
Newcomb's Problem
Causal decision theory: take both boxes. Once the Predictor has acted, your choice cannot change what is in B. The correlation between one-boxing and wealth …
The Double-Slit Experiment
Standard naturalism (in its post-Bohmian guise) accepts hidden variables — pilot-wave theory: particles do have trajectories, guided by a non-local quantum potential. The experiment shows …
Bell Test Experiments
Bohmian mechanics retains realism (particles have positions) but pays with explicit non-locality: the pilot wave acts instantaneously across space. The experiment is taken to favour …
The Michelson–Morley Experiment
A canonical case of the scientific method dispatching a metaphysically loaded posit: the aether had no work left to do once special relativity replaced it. …
Schrödinger's Cat
Pilot-wave / Bohmian: the cat has a definite state throughout — guided by a wave function we cannot fully access. The apparent paradox is an …
Brain in a Vat
Naturalists who accept semantic externalism (Burge, Putnam) take the conclusion at face value: skepticism is defused, not by direct rebuttal, but by showing its premises …
Twin Earth
Causal theories of reference (Kripke, Putnam) sit naturally with naturalism: meaning is anchored by the same causal commerce with the world that underwrites the rest …
Philosophical Zombies
Deny premise (1) (zombies are not coherently conceivable on close examination) or (2) (conceivability does not entail possibility for *a posteriori* identities). Dennett: zombies are …
The Experience Machine
Modern naturalism splits: hedonist naturalists endorse plugging in; objective-list and preference-satisfaction naturalists do not. The case shows that "well-being" is multiply theorisable, not that one …
The Trolley Problem
Modern moral-psychology naturalism (Greene): the asymmetry reflects dual-process cognition — an emotional alarm at personal force versus a more utilitarian deliberative response. The case reveals …
Galileo's Falling Bodies
The argument is the founding move of mathematical physics: a logical lever that dissolves a centuries-old dogma at no observational cost. Scientific naturalism treats it …
Einstein's Elevator
A canonical case where pure reasoning, anchored by a physical principle, leads to a radical new theory that observation later confirms (Eddington 1919, Pound–Rebka, gravitational …
Maxwell's Demon
Landauer–Bennett resolution: the demon is a physical system, its memory is physical, and erasure is dissipative. The second law is preserved — and information is …
Boltzmann Brains
A cosmology that predicts most observers are BBs is *self-undermining* — it cannot account for the experimental records on which it is itself based. Hence: …
The Stern–Gerlach Experiment
A canonical case of an experiment forcing revision of classical concepts: the observed discreteness cannot be reconciled with continuous classical physics. Quantum mechanics is empirically …
Eddington's Eclipse Expedition
A model case of hypothetico-deductive confirmation: a quantitative prediction from a radical theory, tested at one of its few accessible regimes, and observed. Scientific naturalism's …
Hafele–Keating
A canonical empirical confirmation: a quantitative prediction from special and general relativity, tested with macroscopic clocks at ordinary speeds, observed within error.
The Pound–Rebka Experiment
A laboratory-scale GR confirmation, achievable by two people in a tower with sufficient ingenuity — the kind of result that solidifies a theory beyond astronomical …
Foucault's Pendulum
A canonical demonstration: rotation is empirically detectable from inside a closed laboratory. Whatever the underlying ontology, the experimental fact is unimpeachable.
The Cavendish Experiment
A canonical example of experimental ingenuity extending the reach of theory: Newton's law, derived from astronomical data, is shown to hold at the scale of …
The Wu Experiment
A standard case of nature defeating an *a priori* assumption: parity invariance felt necessary, but it had never been tested. The result is canonical in …
LIGO Gravitational-Wave Detection
A canonical empirical confirmation: a quantitative prediction from GR, detected with the predicted waveform, opening a new observational window. The kind of result scientific naturalism …
The Cosmic Microwave Background
A canonical empirical decision: between two cosmological models, one predicted the signal and the other did not. The CMB settled the question and now underwrites …
Libet's Free Will Experiments
Compatibilist naturalism: the readiness-potential is part of what *choosing* is; the time-lag is a red herring once we drop the dualist picture of an agent …
The Millikan Oil-Drop Experiment
A canonical empirical decision: continuous-charge theories are simply ruled out by the data. Atomism about charge becomes scientific orthodoxy.
The Rutherford Gold-Foil Experiment
A canonical empirical reckoning: the Thomson model was the consensus view; the data forced its replacement within months. Rutherford's analysis is a model of how …
Plato's Cave
The Forms are an unneeded metaphysical layer; sensible reality is the only reality, and science is the disciplined refinement of cave-wall observation, not an exit …
Descartes' Evil Demon
Modern naturalism rejects the Cartesian first-person starting point: epistemology proceeds within natural science, not prior to it. The demon hypothesis is a parable, not a …
Buridan's Ass
Real biological agents are noisy; tie cases are resolved by stochastic neural processes. The thought experiment dissolves once one drops the idealisation of perfect rationality.
The Inverted Spectrum
Functionalist naturalism: colour space is structurally asymmetric (yellow and blue are not symmetric to red and green); any actual inversion would produce detectable behavioural differences. …
Swampman
Many naturalists side with the externalist conclusion: content is grounded in evolutionary-historical function. Without history, Swampman has structures that look like contentful states but are …
Gettier Cases
Externalist naturalism (Goldman, Nozick, Sosa) takes Gettier as motivating a shift from internalist justification to causal/reliabilist conditions. Knowledge is a natural, not purely epistemic, achievement.
The Sorites Paradox
The objects science recognises (atoms, molecules, cells) have precise membership conditions; vague predicates apply to higher-level patterns that are real but not sharp. Vagueness is …
The Sleeping Beauty Problem
A bet-test (long-run frequency of correct heads-guesses over many repetitions) decisively favours the thirder answer; halfer intuitions trace to a subtle confusion about what is …
Frankfurt Cases
Modern compatibilism (Fischer, Watson) treats Frankfurt as definitive: responsibility tracks actual sequence agency, not modal availability of alternatives.
The Veil of Ignorance
The "rational" choice behind the veil depends on controversial assumptions about risk aversion and maximin reasoning. Empirical game-theoretic and evolutionary analyses do not consistently support …
Bostrom's Simulation Argument
The trilemma is formally valid given its premises; the question is whether substrate-independence and typicality reasoning are defensible. Both are contested live questions.
Newton's Prism Experiment
A model case of crucial-experiment methodology: a single well-designed test settles a long-standing theoretical dispute. Newton's optics becomes the paradigm of mathematical physics.
Joule's Mechanical Equivalent of Heat
A canonical empirical case: a theoretical posit (caloric fluid) is replaced by a quantitative law (energy conservation) on the basis of precision measurement. The first …
Faraday's Electromagnetic Induction
A canonical empirical discovery that forced a fundamental conceptual revision: from particles-at-a-distance to local fields. The route from Faraday to Maxwell to Einstein begins here.
Hertz's Electromagnetic Waves
A canonical empirical confirmation: a precise theoretical prediction realised in the laboratory. Maxwell's unification of electromagnetism and optics becomes established physics.
Brownian Motion / Perrin's Confirmation
A canonical empirical decision: a long-running theoretical dispute (atomism vs energetics) is settled by quantitative experiment. After Perrin, atomic-molecular theory is no longer optional.
The Photoelectric Effect
A canonical empirical revision: classical theory predicted wrong; quantum theory predicted right. Einstein's heuristic of "light quanta" is empirically mandated.
Pasteur's Swan-Neck Flask
A model empirical demonstration: a hypothesis (life requires precursors) is tested against a clean alternative (spontaneous generation) and decisively confirmed. Germ theory and modern medicine …
Mendel's Pea Plants
A canonical case of quantitative biology: precise statistical predictions, confirmed across thousands of plants. Mendelian inheritance is the foundation of modern genetics and evolutionary theory.
Hubble's Redshift Law
A model of empirical cosmology: quantitative observations decisively favouring a non-static universe. The Big Bang model is built on this foundation.
The Higgs Boson Discovery
A canonical empirical confirmation of fundamental physics. The Standard Model is established as the correct effective theory up to the TeV scale.
Neutrino Oscillations
A canonical empirical extension of the Standard Model: a long-standing observational anomaly (solar neutrino deficit) is resolved by a specific quantum mechanism requiring neutrino mass. …
Quantum Teleportation
A canonical proof-of-concept for quantum information processing. The protocol is implemented and works; the foundations of quantum computing rest on this and related experiments.
The Violinist
Compatibilist secular ethics: rights and consent structures matter; the analogy is partial but illuminating in shifting attention to bodily-use claims rather than personhood alone.
The Drowning Child
Consequentialist naturalism reads the argument as decisive: distance is not a morally relevant feature, only consequences are. Effective altruism follows directly.
Block's Chinese Nation
Functionalist naturalism bites the bullet: at the right level of organisation and timescale, the Chinese Nation would be a conscious system. The intuition reflects unfamiliarity, …
The Repugnant Conclusion
A live battleground for ethical theory: average utilitarianism, person-affecting views, critical-level theories all face their own counterexamples (Parfit's "non-identity problem"). No consensus solution.
The Ring of Gyges
Evolutionary and game-theoretic accounts: cooperation and just behaviour are stable equilibria even absent enforcement, given iterated interactions and social emotions. The ring tests a one-shot …
Newton's Bucket
The case forced a foundational question physics has been answering for three centuries: post-GR, "rotation relative to what" has a precise but counterintuitive answer.
Galileo's Ship
The first clear statement of inertial frame invariance, a constraint every subsequent physical theory has had to respect.
Hilbert's Hotel
Mathematics admits consistent infinite structures; whether the physical universe contains actual infinities is an empirical question (cosmological topology) that remains open.
Pascal's Wager
The many-gods problem dispatches the wager: symmetric reasoning produces opposing bets for incompatible religions. Decision theory cannot bootstrap evidence.
Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis
Existence is not a free predicate of structure; the MUH inflates ontology without empirical purchase. Standard naturalism rejects the level-IV multiverse.
Dennett's 'Where Am I?'
Dennett's own conclusion: the self is a useful abstraction, a centre of narrative gravity. The "where am I" question is over-extended folk psychology.
Compton Scattering
A clean empirical decision: classical theory predicts wrong; quantum theory predicts exactly right. Photons are real particles with momentum.
The Hershey–Chase Experiment
A canonical empirical result that opened molecular biology: the abstract gene of Mendelian genetics now has a chemical identity.
The Meselson–Stahl Experiment
A canonical experimental decision among three live mechanisms by a single clean test. Molecular biology at its experimental best.
Milgram's Obedience Experiments
A foundational empirical demonstration of situationism: behaviour is heavily shaped by structural features of the social context, not just character. The implication for moral and …
Asch's Conformity Experiments
A canonical demonstration of how social influence shapes even what subjects take to be direct perception. Foundational for the social epistemology subsequent work has built.
Galileo's Inclined Plane
A model case of how to do mathematical physics: clever experimental design dilutes a difficult phenomenon to make it measurable, yielding a quantitative law.
Lavoisier's Conservation of Mass
A canonical empirical decision: phlogiston theory falls, oxygen-based combustion stands, chemistry becomes a quantitative science. The methodological turn is as important as the substantive result.
Coulomb's Torsion Balance
A canonical empirical law: precise quantitative measurement establishes the force's functional form. Electrostatics becomes a quantitative science.
CP Violation in Kaon Decay
A canonical empirical surprise: a symmetry assumed for elegance is overturned by precision measurement. The CP-violation discovery has shaped particle physics for sixty years.
Bose–Einstein Condensation
A landmark experimental achievement: a 70-year-old theoretical prediction realised by precision laser cooling. Quantum mechanics is shown to govern more than the atomic scale.
The Lamb Shift
A canonical empirical decision: classical-vacuum theory predicts wrong; QED predicts right to many digits. Vacuum field-theory is empirically mandated.
The Avery–MacLeod–McCarty Experiment
A canonical case of careful chemical identification: a biological phenomenon (transformation) is traced to a specific molecule (DNA) by progressive purification and enzymatic test.
The Doomsday Argument
Live debate: depends on the right reference class and prior. Many naturalists treat the argument as a useful constraint on cosmology and risk reasoning without …
The Lottery Paradox
Bayesian naturalism: there is no "outright belief" in any deep sense; credences are what matter, and the paradox dissolves once we abandon the threshold-belief framework.
The Two Envelopes Paradox
The paradox is a technical artifact of improper priors over unbounded distributions; with any proper prior, expected-value reasoning is consistent. A useful warning against careless …
Hesperus and Phosphorus
Causal theorists (Kripke, Putnam): names refer directly via causal-historical chains; the Frege "sense" is reconstructed as a mode of presentation, not as a constituent of …
Quine's Gavagai
A foundational text of naturalised semantics: meaning is whatever can be reconstructed from behaviour, and the indeterminacy is genuine, not an artifact of insufficient data.
Hempel's Ravens
Bayesian naturalism: yes, white shoes do confirm, but by a negligible amount given that the class of non-black things is astronomically larger than the class …
Goodman's Grue
Naturalists appeal to natural kinds or natural properties (Quine, Lewis): "green" picks out a genuine similarity class, "grue" does not. The reply is partial — …
Eternal Recurrence
Cosmologically, Poincaré recurrence holds for finite-state systems; whether the universe satisfies the conditions is an empirical question. Ethically, the case is suggestive but not binding.
The Bilking Argument
Standard physics is time-symmetric at the level of fundamental laws; the cause-effect asymmetry is statistical (thermodynamic), not absolute. Backward causation is not ruled out *a …
Eratosthenes' Measurement of Earth
A canonical example of mathematical method applied to nature: precision measurement from indirect angular observation, yielding a planetary-scale result.
Galileo's Moons of Jupiter
A canonical empirical refutation: a single direct observation overturns a long-standing cosmological doctrine. Modern observational astronomy begins here.
Tycho's Supernova
A canonical empirical refutation of an entrenched theoretical doctrine: Aristotelian celestial immutability falls to a careful parallax measurement.
Hess's Cosmic-Ray Balloon Flights
A canonical empirical surprise: a measurement designed to confirm a terrestrial source refutes it and opens a new field. The methodological lesson stands as a …
The Aharonov–Bohm Effect
Forces a refinement of the classical field-only ontology: the gauge potential matters quantum-mechanically. Modern naturalism accepts gauge structure as part of physical reality.
Tonomura's Single-Electron Interference
A canonical demonstration of quantum non-classicality in a single-particle regime. The result eliminates classical particle and classical wave readings simultaneously.
The Discovery of Pulsars
A canonical empirical discovery: a strange signal is identified, alternative explanations ruled out, and a previously hypothetical class of objects (neutron stars) is empirically confirmed.
The November Revolution
A canonical empirical confirmation: two independent discoveries of the same particle at the same energy, with theoretical interpretation following within months. Particle physics methodology at …
The Discovery of W and Z Bosons
A canonical empirical confirmation of a major theoretical synthesis: a quantitative prediction from electroweak unification realised in a custom-built collider. Standard Model methodology vindicated.
The Top Quark Discovery
A canonical empirical confirmation of the third-generation prediction; the top is at last accounted for.
Trapped Anti-Hydrogen at CERN ALPHA
A landmark empirical achievement: an exotic predicted state of matter is produced, trapped, and now precision-studied.
Lunar Laser Ranging
A model of decades-long precision physics: half a century of accumulating data progressively tightens tests of GR; no deviation observed.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Physicalists (Dennett, Lewis): "what it is like" is itself a functional/representational state amenable to scientific account. The intuition is misleading.
Block's Blockhead
Functionalist naturalism: the right level of analysis is the cognitive architecture, not behavioural input-output alone. Blockhead's wrong architecture is what disqualifies it.
Wittgenstein's Lion
Animals communicate within their own forms of life; cross-species translation is constrained but not impossible. Cognitive ethology has narrowed the gap Wittgenstein left open.
Reid's Brave Officer
Biological / physical continuity grounds identity; psychological continuity is a sequel, not the foundation. Reid's case shows the limits of pure-memory accounts.
Locke's Prince and the Cobbler
Animalist naturalism (Olson): we are biological organisms; "prince" and "cobbler" track different organisms, and Locke confuses person with personality.
Williams' Self and the Future
Animalist naturalism wins the second framing: we are biological organisms whose persistence is somatic. The first framing is misleading because of how the swap is …
Strawson's Reactive Attitudes
Compatibilist naturalism: responsibility is fixed by features of agents and contexts that determinism does not threaten. Strawson grounds compatibilism in the structure of moral practice.
Nozick's Tale of the Slave
Libertarian naturalism: the case discloses that all coerced political arrangements contain elements that cannot be sharply distinguished from slavery. The lesson is to minimise coercion.
Singer's Expanding Circle
Compatible with utilitarian and consequentialist naturalism: sentience is the morally relevant feature, and circle-expansion tracks the principled recognition of it.
Rømer's Measurement of the Speed of Light
A canonical empirical discovery: a systematic discrepancy is identified, its source diagnosed, and a fundamental constant of nature extracted. Centuries of subsequent physics depend on …
Torricelli's Barometer
A model demonstration: a long-standing theoretical doctrine ("horror vacui") is falsified by a clean experiment, and a new quantitative concept (atmospheric pressure) is introduced.
Ørsted's Compass Deflection
A canonical empirical discovery and the foundational moment of electromagnetic physics. Unification of forces becomes a guiding methodological principle.
Röntgen's X-Rays
A canonical empirical discovery: an unexpected phenomenon, rapidly characterised and exploited, transforming both physics and medicine.
Discovery of Radioactivity
A canonical empirical surprise that opens an entire new domain of physics. The transmutation of elements moves from alchemy to laboratory fact.
Seafloor Spreading
A canonical empirical decision: a theory long resisted for lack of mechanism is decisively confirmed by an independent line of evidence. Modern geoscience is reshaped.
The Cesium Atomic Clock
A canonical metrological revolution: time is defined by a precise quantum transition rather than by approximate astronomical periods. Modern physics depends on it.
JWST's Surprisingly Mature Early Galaxies
A live empirical situation: results to date are consistent with refinements of standard cosmology (improved IMF assumptions, more efficient early star formation), but new physics …
Boyle's J-Tube
A canonical foundational law of chemistry/physics; quantitative measurement replaces Aristotelian qualitative description.
The Faraday Cage
A direct empirical confirmation of the boundary conditions Maxwell's equations require; foundational for the field theory of electromagnetism.
Volta's Pile
A canonical experimental discovery and the empirical foundation of the entire electrical age. The interconvertibility of chemical and electrical energy becomes a guiding theme.
The Hubble Deep Fields
A model of observational cosmology: a small patch of sky reveals the structure of the universe at all redshifts accessible to the instrument.
Kripke's "Plus" vs "Quus"
Dispositionalist naturalism (Fodor): facts about brain states fix meaning, given enough detail. The paradox is about our access to such facts, not their existence.
The Survival Lottery
Consequentialists must either bite the bullet or develop indirect-utilitarian justifications for why such institutions undermine welfare. No clean resolution.
Meno's Slave Boy
Cognitive science identifies real innate capacities (Chomsky, Spelke); Plato's pre-natal-knowledge gloss is mythological, but the structural insight survives.
BonJour's Clairvoyant
Sophisticated reliabilism (process-virtue reliabilism, agent reliabilism) handles the case by requiring not just reliability but also integration into the agent's cognitive architecture.
Williamson's Anti-Luminosity Argument
Empirically congenial: self-knowledge is mediated by error-prone cognitive processes, not by transparent introspective access.
The Frame Problem
Modern naturalist cognitive science takes the frame problem as a foundational constraint: cognitive systems must be relevance-sensitive in ways no purely-logical formalisation captures.
Pascal's Mugging
Practical rationality should be bounded; agents should refuse muggers on Bayesian-prior grounds (priors over absurd claims fall faster than utilities grow).
Searle's Wisdom Tooth
Reductive naturalism resists Searle's claim of irreducibility; non-reductive naturalism finds Searle's position congenial but adds clearer specification of supervenience relations.
Anscombe's Intention
Reductive naturalism prefers to identify actions with bodily events under causal description; Anscombe shows the limits of that move.
Davidson's Triangulation
Externalist naturalism congenial: thought-content is fixed by causal-social structure, not by introspectible inner episodes.
Galvani's Twitching Frogs
Both Galvani and Volta were partially right: the metals provide the EMF, but nerves and muscles really do conduct electrical signals — established in the …
Olbers' Paradox
A canonical demonstration that "obvious" cosmological assumptions have testable consequences. Big Bang cosmology resolves the paradox.
Anderson's Discovery of the Positron
A canonical successful prediction: a radical theoretical implication (antimatter) is confirmed by direct observation within four years of theory.
The Discovery of the Muon
Nature contains more particles than minimal models require; the discovery prefigures the rich particle zoo and the eventual three-generation Standard Model.
Cherenkov Radiation
A canonical discovery exploited massively: large-scale neutrino observatories and cosmic-ray detectors use Cherenkov radiation as their primary signal.
Rossi-Hall Cosmic-Ray Muon Time Dilation
A canonical confirmation of special relativity using naturally-produced particles; one of the cleanest tests of time dilation.
The Quantum Hall Effect
A canonical empirical demonstration of topological quantum order; condensed matter physics is reshaped by the discovery of topological phases.
High-Tc Superconductivity
A canonical empirical surprise: a longstanding theoretical bound (BCS T_c limits) is shattered by an unexpected material class. Condensed matter physics restructured.
The First Image of a Black Hole
A canonical achievement of modern astronomy: long-predicted phenomena (event horizons) imaged directly for the first time, in agreement with theory.
WMAP and Planck CMB Anisotropy Maps
A foundational triumph of empirical cosmology: a precise quantitative model of the early universe fitted to extraordinary precision.
The Casimir Effect
A canonical QED prediction-and-confirmation, extending the Lamb-shift demonstration into a directly mechanical regime.
Voyager 1 Crossing the Heliopause
A landmark achievement of scientific exploration: human-built instruments report data from outside the Sun's influence.
Archimedes' Eureka — The Displacement Principle
Density is a mind-independent property of matter; Archimedes' test exploits it. Nature furnishes the regularity; the experimenter merely reads it off.
Archimedes' Lever Demonstrations
The lever law is a natural regularity that holds regardless of the materials or the era. Archimedes discovered a universal mechanical truth.
Hipparchus' Star Catalogue
Precession is a natural regularity with a definite period (25,800 years); Hipparchus extracted it from two centuries of accumulated data. Nature is law-governed even at …
Hero's Aeolipile
The aeolipile exploits natural regularities: phase transition, reaction force, conservation of momentum. Nature supplies the mechanism; Hero merely channels it.
Galen's Nerve Experiments
A definitive empirical demonstration: nervous function is a natural, material process. Cut the nerve, lose the function. No appeal to immaterial souls is needed to …
Zhang Heng's Seismoscope
Earthquakes are natural events whose effects propagate predictably through the material Earth. The seismoscope exploits this regularity — a naturalistic alternative to supernatural explanations of …
Ibn al-Haytham's Camera Obscura
Light as a natural, physical phenomenon obeying geometric laws — rectilinear propagation, reflection, refraction. The camera obscura demonstrates natural regularity without appeal to occult visual …
Roger Bacon's Optics
Light, refraction, and rainbow formation are natural phenomena amenable to geometric analysis and experimental study. Bacon's optics is natural philosophy becoming natural science.
Shen Kuo's Compass Declination
Magnetic declination is a natural phenomenon with a physical cause (the offset of Earth's magnetic dipole from its rotational axis). Shen Kuo observed a natural …
Films Reading Through This School (21)
Ex Machina
A confident functionalist naturalism: Ava is conscious if her behaviour and cognitive architecture warrant it, regardless of substrate. The film's final act treats her as …
Interstellar
A consistent naturalism: even "love" is treated as a natural — if not yet fully understood — connection, not as a non-physical force. Brand's speech …
2001: A Space Odyssey
A consistent naturalism: the monoliths are alien technology, not gods. Intelligence is treated as an empirical phenomenon that can be catalysed, evolved, replaced by AI, …
The Truman Show
A naturalist construction of a sceptical scenario: no supernatural or metaphysical machinery is invoked. The world is a soundstage. The truth, when revealed, is mundane.
Melancholia
The film's science is rigorously naturalist: no providence intervenes, no last-minute reprieve, no afterlife. The planet behaves according to gravity; the people behave according to …
Under the Skin
The film's metaphysics is severely naturalist: no spirits, no symbolism it endorses, no redemption. The creature is a biological mechanism with a job; the men …
Annihilation
The film insists its events are natural: the Shimmer is a physical phenomenon obeying physical rules we do not yet have. The team's investigation is …
Children of Men
The film is severely naturalist: no providential explanation of the fertility collapse is offered or implied, and the response is biological, political, and logistical rather …
Rear Window
The film operates within a strict naturalism: no providence, no mystery beyond the physical, no consolation that the truth will out by means other than …
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
The film operates within a strict naturalism: no providence intervenes, no omen is given weight, and the captain's decisions are tested by their consequences in …
The Imitation Game
The film operates within a strict naturalism: no providence, no sentimentalised genius mystique, no redemptive arc imposed on Turing's death. The chemical castration is naturalised …
Hacksaw Ridge
The combat sequences are naturalist in execution: physics-respecting wounds, no providential rescues, no angels visible in the smoke. Doss's survival is rendered as improbable rather …
The Conversation
The film operates within a strict naturalism: the tape is electromagnetic data, the conversation is physical sound, the murder is a physical event. No providence …
Spotlight
The investigation operates on strict naturalist principles: no providence intervenes, no whistle is blown by anyone with religious motive. The mechanism is uncovered through documents, …
The Matrix
A naturalist reading is available too: the matrix is a perfectly natural artifact — sophisticated machines running a simulation — and the way out is …
Blade Runner
A consistent naturalism: replicants are made of the same stuff as humans, with the same cognitive-emotional capacities, and the distinction is purely conventional. Biological naturalism, …
Primer
The film's naturalism is severe: no agency beyond the natural, no consolation, no meaning imposed on the timeline by anything other than the two engineers' …
12 Angry Men
The film operates within a naturalist frame: no appeal to providence, no extra-legal moral order, no deus ex machina. The jurors are twelve men in …
Coherence
The film is naturalist in temperament: no providence, no mysticism, no consolation. The comet is a physical event with physical consequences, and the moral chaos …
eXistenZ
Despite the recursive-simulation metaphysics, the film is naturalist in its handling of bodies, biology, and physical consequence. The game pods breathe, get sick, can be …
Brigham City
The murder investigation operates on strict naturalist principles: physical evidence, forensic procedure, systematic interview. The film does not allow the LDS framework to substitute for …
Debates Where This School Is Allied (40)
The Russell–Copleston Debate
Atheist analytic philosopher
The Augustine–Pelagius Controversy
British monk; moral capacity of fallen humanity
The Hobbes–Bramhall Debate
Materialist; compatibilist determinist
The Newton–Hooke Disputes
Experimental philosopher; Royal Society curator
Carnap–Quine on Analyticity
Naturalised epistemologist
The Foucault–Chomsky Debate
Naturalist; defender of human nature
Sartre–Heidegger on Humanism
Atheist existentialist
Galileo and the Inquisition
Mathematical natural philosopher
Voltaire–Leibniz on Theodicy
Empirical sceptic; anti-theodicist
Berkeley vs Locke on Material Substance
Representational realist
Carnap vs Heidegger on Metaphysics
Logical empiricist
Sartre vs Camus on Revolution
Existentialist humanist; absurdist
Kant and Hume
Skeptical empiricist
Nietzsche vs Wagner
Philosopher of life; critic of decadence
Spinoza and Leibniz
Rationalist substance-monist
Mencius vs Xunzi on Human Nature
Confucian theorist of cultivated goodness
Russell vs Bergson on Time
Analytic philosopher; defender of mathematical time
Wittgenstein vs Russell
Logical analyst; defender of foundational philosophy
The Positivismusstreit
Critical rationalist
Searle vs Derrida on Speech Acts
Analytic philosopher of language
Mill vs Whewell on Induction
Empiricist philosopher of science
Locke vs Stillingfleet
Philosopher of empirical knowledge
Bergson vs Einstein on Time
Theoretical physicist
Putnam vs Rorty on Truth
Neo-pragmatist; post-philosophical
The Wittgenstein–Popper Poker
Critical rationalist
The Hume–Rousseau Affair
Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and historian
Confucianism vs Mohism
Founder of Mohism; impartialist
Calvin and the Trial of Servetus
Anti-Trinitarian; physician-theologian
James vs Russell on Pragmatism
Founder of American pragmatism
James vs Russell on Pragmatism
Analytic realist
Kuhn vs Popper on Scientific Change
Historian-philosopher of science
Kuhn vs Popper on Scientific Change
Critical rationalist
Lewis vs Stalnaker on Counterfactuals
Modal logician; pragmatist philosopher of language
Aristotle vs Democritus on Atoms
Ancient atomist
Plato vs Diogenes
Cynic philosopher; saboteur of Platonism
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Christian anarchist-moralist novelist
Wollstonecraft vs Rousseau on Women
Enlightenment philosopher; pioneering feminist
Epicurus vs the Stoics
Atomist hedonist
Epicurus vs the Stoics
Cosmopolitan virtue ethicists; providential physicists
Hobbes vs Descartes
Materialist empiricist
Works that name Naturalism in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
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-10%
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin · 1859 (first edition); five subsequent revised editions in Darwin's lifetime
On the Sacred Disease
Hippocrates (or a Hippocratic author) · c. 410–390 BCE
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins · 1976 (revised editions 1989, 2006)
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Late)
Edward O. Wilson · 1975
Fragments and Testimonia
Thales of Miletus · c. 6th century BCE (original); testimonia preserved in sources from the 4th c. BCE onward
Natural History
Pliny the Elder · 77 CE
Micrographia (Early-career (career-defining))
Robert Hooke · 1665
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes · 1651
The Natural History of Religion (Late)
David Hume · 1757 (Four Dissertations)
The Growth of Biological Thought (Late)
Ernst Mayr · 1982
Wonderful Life (Late)
Stephen Jay Gould · 1989
The Double Helix (Mid)
James D. Watson · 1968
Experiments on Plant Hybridization (Late)
Gregor Mendel · 1866 (published in proceedings of Brünn Natural History Society)
The Order of Time (Late)
Carlo Rovelli · 2017 (Italian); 2018 (English)
The Descent of Man (Mature)
Charles Darwin · 1871 (John Murray, London); revised 1874
Experiments and Observations on Electricity (Mid)
Benjamin Franklin · 1747-1750 (letters), 1751 (first edition)
Cosmos (Mid)
Carl Sagan · 1980
The Blind Watchmaker (Mid)
Richard Dawkins · 1986
The God Delusion (Late)
Richard Dawkins · 2006
Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Mid-to-late)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1969
The Roots of Reference (Late)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1974
Pursuit of Truth (Late)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1990 (revised 1992)
Lectures de Potentia Restitutiva (Mid-career)
Robert Hooke · 1678
On Nature (fragments)
Anaximander of Miletus · c. 6th century BCE
From a Logical Point of View (Mid-career)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1953 (essays 1939-1952)
The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (Posthumous)
Robert Hooke · 1705 (posthumous, ed. R. Waller; written c. 1670s-1700)
De Cive (Early)
Thomas Hobbes · 1642 (Latin, Paris); English translation by Hobbes himself 1651
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1951 (Philosophical Review)
Émile (Late)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762 (published the same year as the Social Contract; both condemned and burned by authorities)
Consciousness Explained (Mid)
Daniel C. Dennett · 1991
The Language Instinct (Late)
Steven Pinker · 1994
A Brief History of Time (Late)
Stephen Hawking · 1988
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Late)
Jonathan Haidt · 2012
What Is Life? (Late)
Erwin Schrödinger · 1943 (lectures); 1944 (book)
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Late)
Norbert Wiener · 1948 (2nd ed. 1961)
The Character of Physical Law (Mid)
Richard Feynman · 1964 (lectures); 1965 (book)
Traité élémentaire de chimie (Late)
Antoine Lavoisier · 1789
Descartes' Error (Late)
António Damásio · 1994
The Possibility of Naturalism (Mid)
Roy Bhaskar · 1979 (1st ed.); 1989 (2nd ed.); 1998 (3rd ed.)
A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (Late)
Pierre-Simon Laplace · 1814 (Essai philosophique sur les probabilités)
Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics (Early)
Hugh Everett III · 1957 (Reviews of Modern Physics)
Sidereus Nuncius (Early-mid (the breakthrough that established Galileo's international reputation))
Galileo Galilei · March 1610 (Venice: Tommaso Baglioni)
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Late)
Charles Darwin · 1872 (John Murray, London)
Journal of Researches (Early)
Charles Darwin · 1839 (first edition); 1845 (substantially revised second edition)
The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (Last)
Charles Darwin · 1881 (John Murray, London) — Darwin's last book, published months before his April 1882 death
Pale Blue Dot (Late)
Carl Sagan · 1994
The Dragons of Eden (Mid)
Carl Sagan · 1977
The Demon-Haunted World (Late)
Carl Sagan · 1995
The Ancestor's Tale (Late)
Richard Dawkins · 2004 (1st ed.), 2016 (2nd ed. with Yan Wong)
The Universe in a Nutshell (Mid)
Stephen Hawking · 2001
The Grand Design (Late)
Stephen Hawking · 2010
Brief Answers to the Big Questions (Late)
Stephen Hawking · 2018 (posthumous)
Traité de mécanique céleste (Mid-to-late)
Pierre-Simon Laplace · 1799-1825 (5 vols)
An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations (Mid-career)
Robert Hooke · 1674
The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (Late)
Alan Turing · 1952
Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals) (Early)
Al-Jahiz (Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr) · c. 860
On Nature (fragments)
Anaximenes of Miletus · c. mid-6th century BCE
Notebooks (Codex Atlanticus and others) (Lifelong (the notebooks span Leonardo's entire adult career))
Leonardo da Vinci · c. 1478–1519 (across Leonardo's entire career, from Florence through Milan, Rome, and Amboise)
On Nature (fragments)
Alcmaeon of Croton · c. 5th century BCE
Boundary Stelae and Amarna Inscriptions (attributed)
Nefertiti and Akhenaten (attributed) · c. 1350–1335 BCE
Mind: A Brief Introduction (Late)
John Searle · 2004
The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (Final)
Charles Darwin · 1881
Parts of Animals (Middle)
Aristotle · c. 350-340 BC
Letter to Pythocles (Mature)
Epicurus · c. 306-270 BC
Contact (Late)
Carl Sagan · 1985
Journal (Career-spanning)
Henry David Thoreau · 1837-1861
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Late)
David Hume · Drafted 1751–61; revised continuously; published posthumously 1779
Experience and Nature (Late)
John Dewey · 1925 (Carus Lectures, Chicago; revised 1929)
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
Galileo Galilei · 1632 (Florence; placed on the Index of Prohibited Books later that year)
Novum Organum
Francis Bacon · 1620 (London; intended as Part II of the never-completed Instauratio Magna)
Theological-Political Treatise (Early)
Baruch Spinoza · 1670 (anonymously, with false imprint)
Opticks (Late)
Isaac Newton · 1704 (English first edition); 1706 (Latin)
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Mid (between the First Discourse and the Social Contract))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1755 (submitted to the 1754 essay competition of the Académie de Dijon, on the question of the origin and justification of inequality)
The Interpretation of Dreams (Early (the founding work of psychoanalysis))
Sigmund Freud · 1899 (dated 1900); revised through 1929 (8th edition)
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Early-mid (after the Interpretation of Dreams))
Sigmund Freud · 1905; revised through 1924
Word and Object (Mid)
W.V.O. Quine · 1960
The Quest for Certainty (Late)
John Dewey · 1929 (Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, 1928-29)
Essays on Actions and Events (Mid)
Donald Davidson · 1980 (essays 1963-78)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) (Mid)
Titus Lucretius Carus · c. 55 BCE
Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno à Due Nuove Scienze) (Late)
Galileo Galilei · 1638
The Sceptical Chymist (Mid)
Robert Boyle · 1661
Silent Spring (Late)
Rachel Carson · 1962
A Sand County Almanac (Late)
Aldo Leopold · 1949 (posthumous)
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Late)
James Lovelock · 1979
Natural Goodness (Late)
Philippa Foot · 2001
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Mid)
Mary Midgley · 1978
Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Mid)
Albert Einstein · 1916 (German); 1920 (English)
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Late)
Daniel Kahneman · 2011
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Late)
J. L. Mackie · 1977
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (Late)
James Clerk Maxwell · 1873 (2 vols.; 2nd ed. 1881; 3rd ed. 1891)
A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Mid)
Claude Shannon · 1948 (Bell System Technical Journal)
Attachment and Loss (Late)
John Bowlby · 1969 (vol. I); 1973 (vol. II); 1980 (vol. III)
A New Kind of Science (Mid)
Stephen Wolfram · 1991-2002 (composed over 11 years); 2002 (published)
Homo Deus (Late)
Yuval Noah Harari · 2015 (Hebrew); 2016 (English)
Laughter (Early-mature (between Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution))
Henri Bergson · 1900 (Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, Revue de Paris; book edition 1900; revised many times through 1924)
The Assayer (Mature (composed during the brief honeymoon between Galileo and the new Pope Urban VIII))
Galileo Galilei · 1623 (Rome: Accademia dei Lincei)
Naturales Quaestiones (Late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 62-64 CE (composed during Seneca's retirement)
Historia Animalium (Mature)
Aristotle · c. 343-340 BC (composed during Aristotle's Lesbos period and continued at the Lyceum)
The Maine Woods (Mature-late)
Henry David Thoreau · 1846-57 (three Maine expedition narratives composed across a decade); compiled posthumously 1864
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Mature)
Charles Darwin · 1868 (John Murray, London); revised 1875
Religion and Science (Mid-mature)
Albert Einstein · 1930 (published New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930)
Letter to Herodotus (Mature)
Epicurus · c. 300 BC
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Mid)
Yuval Noah Harari · 2011 (Hebrew), 2014 (English)
The Extended Phenotype (Mid)
Richard Dawkins · 1982
Human, All Too Human (Mid)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1878 (1st part); 1879 (Assorted Opinions and Maxims); 1880 (The Wanderer and His Shadow)
Daybreak (Mid)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1881
A Compendium of Natural Philosophy (Late)
John Wesley · 1763 (expanded 1770, 1777)
Exposition du système du monde (Mid)
Pierre-Simon Laplace · 1796 (revised through 1824)
Théorie analytique des probabilités (Late)
Pierre-Simon Laplace · 1812 (revised 1814, 1820)
The Fabric of Reality (Mid)
David Deutsch · 1997
Edition of Ptolemy's Geography (Middle)
Michael Servetus · 1535 (revised 1541)
On the Will in Nature (Middle)
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1836 (2nd ed. 1854)
Fragments and Anecdotes
Diogenes of Sinope · c. 4th century BCE (reported c. 3rd century CE by Diogenes Laertius)
The Prince (Mature (Machiavelli was 44 and writing from the bitter experience of political defeat and exile))
Niccolo Machiavelli · 1513 (composed in exile at Sant'Andrea in Percussina; published posthumously, 1532)
On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon
Aristarchus of Samos · c. 280 BCE
Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions
Al-Muqaddasi · c. 985 CE
Our Knowledge of the Internal World (Late)
Robert Stalnaker · 2008
Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? (Mid-career, post-EPR)
Niels Bohr · 1935
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Late)
Niels Bohr · 1958
The Philosophical Foundations of Physics (Late)
Rudolf Carnap · 1966 (lectures earlier)
Conversations with Eckermann (Late)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1823-1832 conversations; 1836-1848 publication by Eckermann
Set Theory and Its Logic (Mid-career)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1963 (revised 1969)
Letter to Menoeceus
Epicurus · c. 300 BC
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Isaac Newton · 1687 (first ed.); 1713, 1726 (second and third revised eds)
Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill · 1861 (Fraser's Magazine); 1863 (book form)
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Late)
Adam Smith · 1776 (first ed.); five revised editions in Smith's lifetime
Xunzi
Xun Kuang (Xunzi) · c. 280–230 BC
A Treatise of Human Nature (Early)
David Hume · Books I & II 1739; Book III 1740 (anonymously; Hume aged 28)
Relativity: The Special and General Theory
Albert Einstein · 1916 (German); first English 1920
A History of Western Philosophy (Late)
Bertrand Russell · 1945
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Early-to-late (he revised it throughout his life))
Adam Smith · 1759 (1st edition); 1790 (6th and definitive edition with substantial additions)
Why I Am Not a Christian (Mid-late)
Bertrand Russell · 1927 (lecture); 1957 (collected essays as a book)
Brave New World (Mid (Huxley's breakthrough novel))
Aldous Huxley · 1932
The Concept of Nature (Early-mid (preceding Science and the Modern World, 1925))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1920 (the Tarner Lectures, Trinity College Cambridge)
A System of Logic (Early (Mill's first major book, the foundation of his philosophical reputation))
John Stuart Mill · 1843 (Mill's first major book); revised through 1872 (8th edition)
Psychological Types (Mid (the major systematic work after his 1912-13 break with Freud))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1921
Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Mid-late (mature systematic statement))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1933 (essay collection, English translation by Cary F. Baynes)
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Mid-late)
David Hume · 1751
Gravitation (Mid-late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1973
Civilization and Its Discontents (Late)
Sigmund Freud · 1930 (German; English 1930)
The Future of an Illusion (Late)
Sigmund Freud · 1927 (German; English 1928)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Late)
Sigmund Freud · 1920 (German; English 1922)
Democracy and Education (Mid)
John Dewey · 1916
Art as Experience (Late)
John Dewey · 1934 (William James Lectures at Harvard, 1931)
On the Plurality of Worlds (Late (Lewis's mature systematic statement of the modal-realist programme))
David Lewis · 1986
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Mid)
Donald Davidson · 1984 (essays 1965-83)
On Nature (Fragments) (Early)
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae · c. 460 BCE
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Mid)
Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1979
The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung) (Mid)
Ernst Mach · 1883
The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (Late)
Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama) · 2005
Syntactic Structures (Early)
Noam Chomsky · 1957
Metaphors We Live By (Late)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson · 1980
Animal Liberation (Mid)
Peter Singer · 1975
Full Catastrophe Living (Late)
Jon Kabat-Zinn · 1990 (revised 2013)
An Essay on the Principle of Population (Late)
Thomas Robert Malthus · 1798 (1st edn); 1803 (rev. 2nd edn)
The Division of Labor in Society (Early)
Émile Durkheim · 1893
Intentionality (Mid)
John Searle · 1983
Astronomia Nova (Mid)
Johannes Kepler · 1609
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Late)
Alan Turing · 1950 (Mind)
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Late)
Fernand Braudel · 1949 (1st edn); 1966 (2nd edn revised)
Foundation (Mid)
Isaac Asimov · 1942-50 (stories); 1951 (collected as Foundation)
A Realist Theory of Science (Mid)
Roy Bhaskar · 1975 (1st ed.); 1978 (2nd ed.); 2008 (3rd ed.)
Fathers and Sons (Mid)
Ivan Turgenev · 1860-62 (published in The Russian Messenger 1862)
The Singularity Is Near (Late)
Ray Kurzweil · 2005
The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement (Mid)
Arne Naess · 1973 (Inquiry)
The Structure of the World (Late)
Steven French · 2014
Convention: A Philosophical Study (Early (Lewis's first book, published at 28, the year he began at UCLA))
David Lewis · 1969 (Harvard UP; based on his 1967 Harvard PhD dissertation under W. V. O. Quine)
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (Mature (composed at the height of the developing controversy with Rome))
Galileo Galilei · 1615 (composed; circulated in manuscript; first published 1636 in Strasbourg)
Éléments de la philosophie de Newton (Mid (the work that established Voltaire as a public intellectual of European reach))
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1738 (Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, Amsterdam; revised 1741)
Political Treatise (Late (Spinoza's last work, left incomplete at his death))
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza · 1675-77 (unfinished at Spinoza's 1677 death; published posthumously as part of the Opera Posthuma)
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Early-mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (composed during Thoreau's Walden Pond years 1845-47; published 1849 at Thoreau's own expense)
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Mid-mature)
Albert Einstein · 1916 (Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie); English translation 1920
Principal Doctrines (Mature)
Epicurus · c. 300 BC
Consequences of Pragmatism (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1982
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (Late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1998
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Mid)
Yuval Noah Harari · 2018
Sapiens: A Graphic History (Late)
Yuval Noah Harari · 2020 (vol. 1), 2021 (vol. 2), 2024 (vol. 3); — series ongoing
The Great World-System (Megas Diakosmos) (Mature)
Democritus of Abdera · c. 430 BCE
On the Mind (Mature)
Democritus of Abdera · c. 420 BCE
On Forms (Peri Ideōn) (Mature)
Democritus of Abdera · c. 430 BCE
Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (Mid)
David Bohm · 1957
The Undivided Universe (Late)
David Bohm · 1993 (posthumous; Bohm died October 1992)
Lectures on Psychical Research (Late)
C. D. Broad · 1959-60 (lectures), 1962 (book)
al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb (Canon of Medicine) (Mature)
Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) · c. 1025
The Expanding Circle (Mid)
Peter Singer · 1981 (1st ed.), 2011 (2nd ed.)
Principles of Philosophy (Mature)
René Descartes · 1644
Our Knowledge of the External World (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1914
Mysticism and Logic (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1918
The Conquest of Happiness (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1930
Studies on Hysteria (Early)
Sigmund Freud · 1895
Totem and Taboo (Mid)
Sigmund Freud · 1913
The Ego and the Id (Late)
Sigmund Freud · 1923
Moses and Monotheism (Late)
Sigmund Freud · 1934-38; 1939 (published)
Global Catastrophic Risks (Mid)
Nick Bostrom · 2008
De Corpore (Late)
Thomas Hobbes · 1655
De Homine (Late)
Thomas Hobbes · 1658
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (Early)
Stephen Hawking · 1973
Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer (Early)
David Deutsch · 1985
The Beginning of Infinity (Late)
David Deutsch · 2011
Republic (fragments) (Early)
Zeno of Citium · c. 300 BCE
On Providence (fragments) (Mature)
Chrysippus of Soli · c. 250 BCE
On the Natural Faculties
Galen · c. 175 CE
Fragments and Testimonia
Antisthenes · c. early 4th century BCE (original works); testimonia from antiquity
Xunzi
Xunzi (Xun Kuang) · c. 3rd century BCE
Fragments (Silloi and On Nature)
Xenophanes of Colophon · c. 540–475 BCE
On Pneumatics
Ctesibius of Alexandria · c. 270 BCE
Epic of Gilgamesh
Anonymous / composite (Sin-leqi-unninni, c. 1200 BCE, final redactor) · c. 2100–1200 BCE (composite)
Ways a World Might Be (Late-middle)
Robert Stalnaker · 2003
Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (Mid-career)
Niels Bohr · 1934
Essays 1958–1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Final)
Niels Bohr · 1958–1962 (collection published posthumously, 1963)
The Minimalist Program (Late (linguistic work))
Noam Chomsky · 1995
Expression and Meaning (Mid-career)
John Searle · 1979
Minds, Brains, and Programs (Mid-career)
John Searle · 1980
Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Late)
David Lewis · 1999
Vatican Sayings (Mature)
Epicurus · c. 306-270 BC (compiled later)
Popular Scientific Lectures (Middle)
Ernst Mach · 1895
Inquiry (Mid-career)
Robert Stalnaker · 1984
Context and Content (Mid-to-late)
Robert Stalnaker · 1999
Context (Late)
Robert Stalnaker · 2014
The Poverty of Historicism (Mid-career)
Karl Popper · 1944-45 (Economica articles); book 1957
The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (Middle)
Ernst Cassirer · 1927
Manufacturing Consent (Mid-late (political work))
Noam Chomsky · 1988 (with Edward S. Herman)
De Aeternitate Mundi (Middle)
Siger of Brabant · 1272
General Scholium (Late)
Sir Isaac Newton · 1713 (added to 2nd edition of the Principia)
On Vision and Colors (Early)
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1816
The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (Late)
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1841
Intelligent Machinery (Mid)
Alan Turing · 1948
Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic (Early)
Saul Kripke · 1963
Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Posthumous)
Adam Smith · c. 1750s-1770s composition; 1795 posthumous publication
History of the Inductive Sciences (Mid-career)
William Whewell · 1837 (3 vols)
On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (Early)
Alan Turing · 1936
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Late)
David Hume · 1748 (first published as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding)
Capital, Volume I (Late)
Karl Marx · 1867 (German first ed.); Volume II 1885, Volume III 1894 (posthumous, ed. Engels)
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill · 1859
The Communist Manifesto (Early)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels · February 1848 (commissioned by the Communist League, London)
On the Nature of the Gods (Late)
Marcus Tullius Cicero · 45 BC
Theses on Feuerbach (Early)
Karl Marx · 1845 (notebook fragments, published posthumously by Engels in 1888 with slight editorial changes)
How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Charles Sanders Peirce · 1878 (Popular Science Monthly, January)
Physics and Philosophy
Werner Heisenberg · 1958 (Gifford Lectures, St Andrews, 1955–56)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1962 (1st ed.); 1970 (2nd ed. with postscript); 1996 (3rd ed.)
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Karl R. Popper · Composed 1938–1943 in New Zealand exile; published 1945 (2 vols)
On the Genealogy of Morality (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1887 (composed in 20 days)
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Jean-Paul Sartre · 29 October 1945 (Paris lecture); 1946 (published)
Pragmatism (Late)
William James · 1907 (from 1906 Lowell Lectures, Boston)
Beyond Good and Evil (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1886
The Gay Science (Middle (between Daybreak and Zarathustra))
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882 (first edition, four books); 1887 (second edition, with added fifth book and preface)
Walden (Mid (Thoreau's major prose statement))
Henry David Thoreau · 1854 (drawing on Thoreau's 1845-47 residence at Walden Pond)
Dependent Rational Animals (Late (the explicit Thomist completion of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1999
The Copernican Revolution (Early (Kuhn's first book))
Thomas Kuhn · 1957
The Stranger (Early (the breakthrough novel))
Albert Camus · 1942 (alongside The Myth of Sisyphus; published in occupied Paris)
Ideas and Opinions (Late (the most comprehensive single-volume collection))
Albert Einstein · 1954 (collected from earlier essays and addresses)
Science and the Modern World (Mid (the major statement of philosophical-cultural critique, preceding the technical metaphysics of Process and Reality))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1925 (the Lowell Lectures, Harvard; the proximate prelude to Process and Reality, 1929)
Nausea (Early (Sartre's first novel, before Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1938
No Exit (Mid (alongside Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1944 (first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944)
De Providentia (Late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 64 AD (late in Seneca's life, shortly before his forced suicide)
On Nature (Fragments)
Heraclitus of Ephesus · c. 500 BC (the fragments preserved through later authors' quotations)
Tristes Tropiques (Mid (Lévi-Strauss's most widely read book))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1955
The Savage Mind (Mid (the systematic statement of structural anthropology))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1962
Structural Anthropology (Mid (the methodological consolidation))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1958
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Late (the mature systematic statement of archetypal psychology))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1934-55 (essays composed across two decades); 1959 (compiled as Volume 9, Part 1 of the Collected Works)
Faust, Part I (Mid (composed across Goethe's career; Part I the major mid-career work))
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1772-1808 (composed across decades; Part I published 1808; Part II completed 1832, posthumous)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Early (the 25-year-old Goethe's breakthrough work))
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774
First Inaugural Address (Mid (the inauguration after twelve years of Republican presidency))
William J. Clinton · January 20, 1993
Parerga and Paralipomena (Late)
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1851
Representation and Reality (Mid)
Hilary Putnam · 1988
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Late)
John Locke · 1693
Zen and Japanese Culture (Late)
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1959 (developed from his 1938 Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture)
Answer to Job (Late)
Carl Gustav Jung · 1952
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Late (the major autobiographical work))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1957-61 (recorded conversations with Aniela Jaffé); published 1962
My Life (Late)
William J. Clinton · 2004
Trump: The Art of the Deal (Early)
Donald J. Trump · 1987
Eclipse of Reason (Mid)
Max Horkheimer · 1947 (English original; German edition 1967)
The Fixation of Belief (Early)
Charles Sanders Peirce · 1877 (Popular Science Monthly, November)
Modes of Thought (Late)
Alfred North Whitehead · 1938 (Wellesley & University of Chicago lectures, 1937-38)
The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Early (Lévi-Strauss's breakthrough work; the foundation of structural anthropology))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1949
The Conscious Mind (Early (Chalmers's breakthrough book, derived from his 1993 Indiana PhD))
David J. Chalmers · 1996
Systematic Theology (Late)
Wolfhart Pannenberg · 1988-93 (3 vols; English 1991-98)
The Logical Syntax of Language (Mid)
Rudolf Carnap · 1934 (German; English 1937)
Aspects of Scientific Explanation (Mid)
Carl G. Hempel · 1965
Naming and Necessity (Mid)
Saul Kripke · 1972 (Princeton lectures); 1980 (book)
Counterfactuals (Early)
David Lewis · 1973
Mind and World (Late)
John McDowell · 1994 (1991 John Locke Lectures at Oxford)
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Early)
P.F. Strawson · 1959
Muqaddimah (Late)
Ibn Khaldūn (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān) · 1377
The Feminine Mystique (Late)
Betty Friedan · 1963
On Nature and Purifications (Fragments) (Early)
Empedocles of Acragas · c. 450 BCE
The Prince (Il Principe) (Late)
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1513 (first printed 1532)
Discourses on Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio) (Late)
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1517 (published 1531)
Philosophical Letters (Lettres Philosophiques / Lettres Anglaises) (Mid)
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1734
The Passions of the Soul (Les Passions de l'âme) (Late)
René Descartes · 1649
Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Late)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke · 1715-16
Creative Evolution (L'évolution créatrice) (Late)
Henri Bergson · 1907
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Early)
William Wordsworth · 1800 (1st version); 1802 (expanded)
The Construction of Social Reality (Late)
John R. Searle · 1995
Warranted Christian Belief (Late)
Alvin Plantinga · 2000
Reasons and Persons (Mid)
Derek Parfit · 1984
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2 (Late)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari · 1980
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Après la finitude) (Late)
Quentin Meillassoux · 2006
We Have Never Been Modern (Nous n'avons jamais été modernes) (Mid)
Bruno Latour · 1991
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Late)
Bruno Latour · 2005
The Dream of the Earth (Late)
Thomas Berry · 1988
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Late)
Donna J. Haraway · 2003
Critique of Cynical Reason (Kritik der zynischen Vernunft) (Mid)
Peter Sloterdijk · 1983
The Emperor's New Mind (Late)
Roger Penrose · 1989
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Mid)
Wilfrid Sellars · 1956
Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Late)
John S. Bell · 1987 (papers 1964-86)
The Social Construction of What? (Late)
Ian Hacking · 1999
Notes on the State of Virginia (Mid)
Thomas Jefferson · 1781-82 (composed); 1785 (Paris edn); 1787 (London edn)
The Age of Reason (Late)
Thomas Paine · 1794 (Part I); 1795 (Part II); 1807 (Part III)
Mind, Self, and Society (Late)
George Herbert Mead · 1934 (posthumous; lectures 1928-30)
The Education of Henry Adams (Late)
Henry Adams · 1907 (private printing); 1918 (public)
Reality+ (Late (Chalmers's major popular-and-technical synthesis on virtual reality and the simulation hypothesis))
David J. Chalmers · 2022
The Philosophy of Space and Time (Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre) (Mid)
Hans Reichenbach · 1928
The Essential Tension (Late)
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1977
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Late)
Nick Bostrom · 2014
Cosmopolitics (Late)
Isabelle Stengers · 2003-11 (French in 7 vols; English in 2 vols)
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Late)
David Ricardo · 1817
Language, Truth, and Logic (Early)
A.J. Ayer · 1936
The Concept of Mind (Mid)
Gilbert Ryle · 1949
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Late)
Jeremy Bentham · 1780 (privately printed); 1789 (published)
The Language of Thought (Mid)
Jerry Fodor · 1975
Daodejing (Early)
Laozi (trad. attrib.) · 4th c. BCE (composite text; trad. attrib. Laozi 6th c.)
The Art of War (Early)
Sun Tzu (Sunzi) · 5th c. BCE (Warring States era)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Late)
Edward Gibbon · 1776 (vol. I); 1781 (vols. II-III); 1788-89 (vols. IV-VI)
The Mind of Primitive Man (Late)
Franz Boas · 1911 (1st ed.); 1938 (rev. 2nd ed.)
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Mid)
Noam Chomsky · 1965
Childhood and Society (Mid)
Erik Erikson · 1950 (1st ed.); 1963 (rev. 2nd ed.)
Envy and Gratitude (Late)
Melanie Klein · 1957
The German Ideology (Early)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels · 1845-46 (composed in Brussels; published 1932 by Soviet Union)
Blood Meridian (Late)
Cormac McCarthy · 1985
The Analysis of Matter (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1927
Scientific Thought (Mid)
C. D. Broad · 1923
Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Mid)
John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin · 1976
Anti-Duhring (Late)
Friedrich Engels · 1877-78
Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (Mid)
Nick Bostrom · 2003 (Philosophical Quarterly)
Snow Crash (Mid)
Neal Stephenson · 1992
Hyperobjects (Late)
Timothy Morton · 2013
Food of the Gods (Late)
Terence McKenna · 1992
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Late (Bergson's last major book, written after a long convalescence))
Henri Bergson · 1932 (Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris: Alcan; English trans. R. Ashley Audra & Cloudesley Brereton 1935)
The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language (Early-to-middle (Carnap's most polemical statement of the verificationist programme))
Rudolf Carnap · 1932 (Erkenntnis 2; English trans. Arthur Pap, 1959)
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Mature (Kripke's second major book after Naming and Necessity, 1980))
Saul Kripke · 1982 (Harvard UP; based on 1976 Wolfson College lecture, 1977 Princeton seminars)
Short Treatise on God (Early (Spinoza's first systematic presentation of his metaphysics, predating the Ethics))
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza · c. 1660-62 (Dutch manuscript circulated only among Spinoza's closest correspondents during his lifetime; rediscovered 1862)
On Generation and Corruption (Mature)
Aristotle · c. 350 BC (during Aristotle's mature Lyceum period)
Othello (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1603-04 (first performed Whitehall, 1 November 1604)
Macbeth (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1606
Antony and Cleopatra (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1606-07
A Pluralistic Universe (Late)
William James · 1909 (Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, May 1908)
Essays in Radical Empiricism (Late posthumous)
William James · 1904-08 essays; collected posthumously 1912
Eyeless in Gaza (Mid-mature)
Aldous Huxley · 1936
Brave New World Revisited (Late)
Aldous Huxley · 1958
The World as I See It (Mid-mature)
Albert Einstein · 1934 (German: Mein Weltbild, Querido Verlag, Amsterdam; English: Covici Friede, New York)
Out of My Later Years (Late)
Albert Einstein · 1950 (Philosophical Library, New York)
The Born-Einstein Letters (Mature-late)
Albert Einstein · 1916-55 (correspondence across four decades); published in 1971 (German); English 1971 (Walker)
Theory of Colors (Mature)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1810 (J.G. Cotta, Tübingen)
Italian Journey (Late-mature retrospective)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1816 (parts I-II) and 1829 (part III); recounting 1786-88 journey
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1991
Judgment Under Uncertainty (Mid)
Daniel Kahneman · 1982
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Late)
Daniel Kahneman · 2021
Words and Life (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 1994
The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 1999
Choices, Values, and Frames (Mid)
Daniel Kahneman · 2000
Quantum Theory and Measurement (Mid)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1983
A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (Late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1990
Coal (Mid)
Audre Lorde · 1976 (drawing on poems from 1968 onward)
A Burst of Light (Late)
Audre Lorde · 1988
The Bluest Eye (Mid)
Toni Morrison · 1970
Laboratory Life (Early)
Bruno Latour · 1979
Science in Action (Mid)
Bruno Latour · 1987
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Late)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1886
Resurrection (Late)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1889-1899
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks (Late)
Yuval Noah Harari · 2024
The Art of Happiness (Late)
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama · 1998
Quantum Theory (Early)
David Bohm · 1951
An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (Early)
George Berkeley · 1709
Siris (Late)
George Berkeley · 1744
The Raw and the Cooked (Mature)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1964 (French), 1969 (English)
From Honey to Ashes (Mature)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1967 (French), 1973 (English)
The Origin of Table Manners (Mature)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1968 (French), 1978 (English)
The Naked Man (Late)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1971 (French), 1981 (English)
The Mind and its Place in Nature (Mid)
C. D. Broad · 1923 (lectures), 1925 (book)
Five Types of Ethical Theory (Mid)
C. D. Broad · 1930
The Way of the Masks (Late)
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1975 (French), 1982 (English)
Essay on Conic Sections (Early)
Blaise Pascal · 1640
Pascal-Fermat Correspondence on Probability (Mid)
Blaise Pascal · 1654
Practical Ethics (Mid)
Peter Singer · 1979 (1st ed.), 1993 (2nd ed.), 2011 (3rd ed.)
How Are We to Live? (Mid)
Peter Singer · 1993
The Life You Can Save (Late)
Peter Singer · 2009 (1st ed.), 2019 (10th anniversary ed.)
Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Early)
René Descartes · c. 1628 (unfinished); 1701 (posthumous)
Ecce Homo (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1888 (completed); 1908 (published, posthumous)
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Mature)
Karl Marx · 1859
Pali Canon: Sutta Pitaka (Early)
Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha) · c. 5th-1st c. BCE (compiled c. 1st c. BCE)
Dhammapada (Early)
Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha) · c. 3rd c. BCE (compiled)
Anthropic Bias (Early)
Nick Bostrom · 2002
Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Late)
Arne Næss · 1989
Interpretation and Preciseness (Mid)
Arne Næss · 1953
Life's Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World (Late)
Arne Næss · 2002
Spinoza and Ecology (Mid)
Arne Næss · 1977
Reclaiming Reality (Mid)
Roy Bhaskar · 1989
Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (Early)
Thomas Hobbes · 1640
Of Induction (Mid-career polemic)
William Whewell · 1849
Novum Organon Renovatum (Late)
William Whewell · 1858
American Power and the New Mandarins (Early (political work))
Noam Chomsky · 1969
Reflections on Language (Mid-career (linguistic work))
Noam Chomsky · 1975
A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic (Earliest)
Saul Kripke · 1959 (Kripke aged 18)
Philosophical Troubles (Late)
Saul Kripke · 2011 (essays 1962-2008)
The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis (Middle)
Kurt Gödel · 1940
Knowledge and Error (Late)
Ernst Mach · 1905
Fragments (Reconstructed)
Posidonius (reconstructed) · c. 1st century BCE (original works); testimonia from 1st c. BCE–2nd c. CE
Collected Commentaries on the Four Books (Sishu Jizhu) (Late)
Zhu Xi · c. 1177–1190 (revised throughout his life)
On Floating Bodies
Archimedes of Syracuse · c. 250 BCE
On the Measurement of the Earth (reconstructed)
Eratosthenes of Cyrene · c. 240 BCE
Attributed Sayings and Wisdom Traditions
Imhotep · c. 2650–2600 BCE (original period; surviving references from later periods)
Quaestiones super Librum de Causis (Late)
Siger of Brabant · c. 1272-76
The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (Mid-career (companion to the History))
William Whewell · 1840 (revised 1847, 1858–60)
Objective Knowledge (Late)
Karl Popper · 1972 (essays 1960-72)
Quaestiones in Tertium De Anima (Early-to-middle)
Siger of Brabant · c. 1265-1270
Collected Philosophical Papers (Late)
G. E. M. Anscombe (Elizabeth Anscombe) · 1981 (papers c. 1950-1980)
Hymn to Zeus
Cleanthes · c. 3rd century BCE
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus · c. 170–180 AD
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 (French two-vol. ed.)
The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James · 1901–02 (Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh); 1902 (book form)
Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Sextus Empiricus · c. 160–210 AD
Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1945
Discipline and Punish (Late)
Michel Foucault · 1975
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Early)
Karl Marx · Paris, summer 1844 (notebook manuscripts; unfinished and unpublished in Marx's lifetime); first published 1932
The Birth of Tragedy (Early)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1872 (with "Attempt at a Self-Criticism" preface added 1886)
The Ethics of Ambiguity (Early)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1947
The Subjection of Women (Late)
John Stuart Mill · Written 1860–61 with Harriet Taylor Mill's collaboration; published 1869
The Rebel (Late)
Albert Camus · 1951
Principia Mathematica (Early (both authors))
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell · 1910 (vol. 1), 1912 (vol. 2), 1913 (vol. 3); 2nd edition 1925-27
Discourse on the Method (Mid (1637, in mature middle age; preceding the Meditations of 1641))
René Descartes · 1637 (published anonymously as the preface to three scientific essays — Optics, Meteorology, Geometry)
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Mid-late (after The Human Condition, before The Life of the Mind))
Hannah Arendt · 1963 (New Yorker articles 1962-63, then book)
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Mid (the breakthrough book))
Richard Rorty · 1979
Essays: First Series (Mid (Emerson at the peak of his powers))
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (twelve essays collected from earlier lectures and journal entries)
The Will to Believe (Mid (between Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience))
William James · 1897 (title essay, addressed to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown, 1896)
Adventures of Ideas (Late (Whitehead's last major book))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1933
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Mid (Arendt's breakthrough book))
Hannah Arendt · 1951 (with later editions adding new prefaces and material through 1968)
On Revolution (Late (after Eichmann in Jerusalem))
Hannah Arendt · 1963
The Social Contract (Late (after the two Discourses; the political conclusion of Rousseau's mature thought))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762
The Principles of Psychology (Mid (the major early work; foundational for both psychology and pragmatist philosophy))
William James · 1890 (after twelve years of writing; James later said he should not have spent so much time on it)
The Logical Structure of the World (Early (Carnap's breakthrough work))
Rudolf Carnap · 1928 (Carnap's habilitation; the founding text of the Vienna Circle's constructive-philosophical programme)
The Plague (Mid (between The Stranger and The Rebel))
Albert Camus · 1947
The Doors of Perception (Late)
Aldous Huxley · 1954 (essay-length; often published together with the 1956 Heaven and Hell)
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Mature (the most comprehensive single-text statement of the system))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1817 (1st edition); 1827 (2nd edition); 1830 (3rd and definitive edition, in three volumes)
Madness and Civilization (Early (Foucault's breakthrough work, his doctoral dissertation))
Michel Foucault · 1961 (Foucault's doctoral dissertation)
The Birth of the Clinic (Early-mid (between Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things))
Michel Foucault · 1963
The Archaeology of Knowledge (Mid (methodological transition between archaeological and genealogical phases))
Michel Foucault · 1969
Principles of Political Economy (Mid (Mill's major economic work))
John Stuart Mill · 1848 (1st edition); revised through 1871 (7th edition)
The Imaginary (Early (preceding Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1940
De Brevitate Vitae (Mid)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 49 AD
On the Heavens
Aristotle · c. 350 BC
Mrs Dalloway (Mid (the first major modernist novel of Woolf's maturity))
Virginia Woolf · 1925
To the Lighthouse (Mid (Woolf at the height of her powers))
Virginia Woolf · 1927
Confessions of a Mask (Early (the breakthrough novel that established Mishima's literary reputation))
Yukio Mishima · 1949 (Mishima's breakthrough novel, written at age 24)
Reason, Truth and History (Mid (the major mid-career book, the systematic statement of internal realism))
Hilary Putnam · 1981
A Time for Choosing (Early (launched Reagan's political career))
Ronald W. Reagan · October 27, 1964 (broadcast nationally on behalf of Goldwater)
Tear Down This Wall (Late (Reagan presidency at its rhetorical peak))
Ronald W. Reagan · June 12, 1987 (delivered at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin)
Why Not the Best? (Mid (pre-presidential))
James Earl Carter Jr. · 1975 (campaign biography for the 1976 presidential campaign)
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Early (preceding the more famous 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman))
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1790 (the first major published response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France)
Six Crises (Mid (pre-presidential, post-1960 defeat))
Richard M. Nixon · 1962 (after Nixon's 1960 presidential defeat to Kennedy)
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Early)
Arthur Schopenhauer · 1813 (doctoral dissertation); 1847 (revised 2nd edition)
Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (Early)
George Berkeley · 1713
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1989
Achieving Our Country (Late)
Richard Rorty · 1998
It from Bit / Information, Physics, Quantum (Late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1989-90 (the "It from Bit" thesis articulated in conference papers and essays)
A Cyborg Manifesto (Mid)
Donna Haraway · 1985 (first published in Socialist Review)
Staying with the Trouble (Late)
Donna Haraway · 2016
The Reasonableness of Christianity (Late)
John Locke · 1695
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Mid)
Yukio Mishima · 1956
Psychology and Alchemy (Late)
Carl Gustav Jung · 1944
Runaway Horses (Late)
Yukio Mishima · 1969 (the second of the four Sea of Fertility novels)
An American Life (Late)
Ronald W. Reagan · 1990
Promises to Keep (Mid)
Joseph R. Biden Jr. · 2007
De Tranquillitate Animi (Mid-late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 60 AD
De Vita Beata (Mid-late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 58 AD
Man's Search for Meaning (Mid-late)
Viktor E. Frankl · 1946 (German original); 1959 (English translation)
The Cancer Journals (Mid)
Audre Lorde · 1980
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Early)
Paul Ricoeur · 1950 (French; English 1966)
Time and Narrative (Late)
Paul Ricoeur · 1983-85 (3 vols; English 1984-88)
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Mid)
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer · 1944 (private circulation); 1947 (Amsterdam edition)
Negative Dialectics (Late)
Theodor W. Adorno · 1966 (German; English 1973)
One-Dimensional Man (Late)
Herbert Marcuse · 1964
Eros and Civilization (Mid)
Herbert Marcuse · 1955
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Late)
Walter Benjamin · 1935-36 (multiple versions); first published 1936 in French
Knowledge and Human Interests (Early)
Jürgen Habermas · 1968 (German; English 1971)
Between Facts and Norms (Late)
Jürgen Habermas · 1992 (German; English 1996)
Bodies That Matter (Early)
Judith Butler · 1993
Jesus Christ and Mythology (Late)
Rudolf Bultmann · 1958 (Shaffer Lectures at Yale)
Theology of the New Testament (Late)
Rudolf Bultmann · 1948-53 (Vol I 1948, Vol II 1953; English 1951-55)
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Early)
Karl Popper · 1934 (Logik der Forschung); 1959 English
Conjectures and Refutations (Mid)
Karl Popper · 1963
The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Late)
Imre Lakatos · 1978 (posthumous; key essays from 1968-71)
Against Method (Mid)
Paul Feyerabend · 1975 (1st edn); 1988 (2nd); 1993 (3rd)
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Late)
Michael Polanyi · 1958 (Gifford Lectures 1951-52 at Aberdeen)
The Uses of Argument (Early)
Stephen Toulmin · 1958
Patterns of Discovery (Early)
Norwood Russell Hanson · 1958
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Mid)
Ernst Cassirer · 1923-29 (Vol I 1923, II 1925, III 1929)
The Visible and the Invisible (Late)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1964 (posthumous; composed 1959-61)
The Prose of the World (Mid)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · composed 1950-52; published 1969 (posthumous)
Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Mid)
Max Scheler · 1913-16 (Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)
Philosophy (Mid)
Karl Jaspers · 1932 (3 vols; English 1969-71)
Philosophy of Existence (Late)
Karl Jaspers · 1938 (German; English 1971)
Making It Explicit (Mid)
Robert Brandom · 1994
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Mid)
Bernard Williams · 1985
Intention (Mid)
G.E.M. Anscombe · 1957
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Mid)
Robert Nozick · 1974
A Secular Age (Late)
Charles Taylor · 2007 (Gifford Lectures 1998-99 at Edinburgh, extensively expanded)
Long Commentary on De Anima (Late)
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) · c. 1190
Summa Logicae (Late)
William of Ockham · c. 1323
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Late)
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792
Frontiers of Justice (Late)
Martha C. Nussbaum · 2006
Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Late)
Charles Hartshorne · 1984
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Late)
Thomas Reid · 1785
Discourses (Diatribai) (Mid)
Epictetus (recorded by Arrian) · c. 108 CE
Enchiridion (Handbook) (Late)
Epictetus (compiled by Arrian) · c. 125 CE
Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Late)
Diogenes Laertius · c. 3rd century CE
On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (De l'Infinito Universo e Mondi) (Late)
Giordano Bruno · 1584
Historical and Critical Dictionary (Dictionnaire Historique et Critique) (Late)
Pierre Bayle · 1697 (2nd expanded edn 1702)
The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois) (Late)
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu · 1748
Candide (Candide, ou l'Optimisme) (Late)
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1759
Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience) (Early)
Henri Bergson · 1889 (doctoral thesis)
Matter and Memory (Matière et Mémoire) (Mid)
Henri Bergson · 1896
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt) (Early)
Franz Brentano · 1874
Leaves of Grass (Late)
Walt Whitman · 1855 (1st edn); 1881 (definitive); 1892 (deathbed)
Speech Acts (Early)
John R. Searle · 1969
The View from Nowhere (Mid)
Thomas Nagel · 1986
An Essay on Free Will (Mid)
Peter van Inwagen · 1983
On Bullshit (Late)
Harry G. Frankfurt · 1986 (Raritan); 2005 (book)
The Philosophy of Philosophy (Late)
Timothy Williamson · 2007
Difference and Repetition (Différence et Répétition) (Mid)
Gilles Deleuze · 1968
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1 (Late)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari · 1972
Écrits (Mid)
Jacques Lacan · 1966 (essays 1936-66)
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La condition postmoderne) (Late)
Jean-François Lyotard · 1979
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Pouvoirs de l'horreur) (Mid)
Julia Kristeva · 1980
Climate and Culture (Fūdo: ningengakuteki kōsatsu) (Mid)
Watsuji Tetsurō · 1935
Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Late)
Kwasi Wiredu · 1996
The End of History and the Last Man (Mid)
Francis Fukuyama · 1992
Ways of Worldmaking (Late)
Nelson Goodman · 1978
The Many Faces of Realism (Mid)
Hilary Putnam · 1987
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Mid)
Marshall McLuhan · 1964
Common Sense (Mid)
Thomas Paine · 1776 (January)
Twenty Years at Hull-House (Late)
Jane Addams · 1910
The Importance of Living (Mid)
Lin Yutang · 1937
Laudato Si' (Late)
Pope Francis · 2015 (24 May)
Gulliver's Travels (Late)
Jonathan Swift · 1726
The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (La Théorie physique: son objet, sa structure) (Late)
Pierre Duhem · 1906
Science and Hypothesis (La Science et l'hypothèse) (Late)
Henri Poincaré · 1902
Ulysses (Mid)
James Joyce · 1914-21 (composed); 1922 (published)
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) (Mid)
Marcel Proust · 1913
Middlemarch (Late)
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) · 1871-72
The Sound and the Fury (Mid)
William Faulkner · 1929
Collected Poems (Late)
Wallace Stevens · 1954 (collection of poems 1923-54)
Raja Yoga: Conquering the Internal Nature (Late)
Swami Vivekananda · 1896
Escape from Freedom (Mid)
Erich Fromm · 1941
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Mid)
Erving Goffman · 1959
The Social Construction of Reality (Mid)
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann · 1966
The Culture of Narcissism (Late)
Christopher Lasch · 1979
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Late)
Robert D. Putnam · 2000
Our Mathematical Universe (Late)
Max Tegmark · 2014
The Black Swan (Late)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2007
If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo) (Mid)
Primo Levi · 1947 (rev. 1958)
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Le Capital au XXIe siècle) (Late)
Thomas Piketty · 2013 (French); 2014 (English)
Confessions (Late)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1769 (composed); 1782-89 (posthumous)
The Methods of Ethics (Late)
Henry Sidgwick · 1874 (1st edn); 1907 (7th, definitive)
Principia Ethica (Early)
G.E. Moore · 1903
How to Do Things with Words (Late)
J.L. Austin · 1955 (William James Lectures at Harvard); 1962 (book, posthumous)
The Blue and Brown Books (Mid)
Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1933-35 (dictations); 1958 (published posthumously)
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Late)
Nicolaus Copernicus · 1543 (published; composed 1510-30s)
Mozi (Early)
Mozi (and Mohist school) · 5th-4th c. BCE (Warring States era)
War and Peace (Mid)
Leo Tolstoy · 1865-69
Anna Karenina (Mid)
Leo Tolstoy · 1873-77 (serialized); 1878 (book)
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Mid)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1795-96
A Doll's House (Mid)
Henrik Ibsen · 1879 (first performed Copenhagen)
The Old Man and the Sea (Late)
Ernest Hemingway · 1952
History of the Peloponnesian War (Early)
Thucydides · c. 431-411 BCE (unfinished at Thucydides's death)
The Histories (Early)
Herodotus · c. 440s-420s BCE
The Construction of Reality in the Child (Mid)
Jean Piaget · 1937 (French); 1954 (English)
Thought and Language (Mid)
Lev Vygotsky · 1934 (posthumous, Vygotsky died June 1934)
Motivation and Personality (Mid)
Abraham Maslow · 1954 (1st ed.); 1970 (rev. 2nd ed.)
Poems (Late)
Gerard Manley Hopkins · 1875-89 (composed); 1918 (posthumous publication ed. Robert Bridges)
North (Mid)
Seamus Heaney · 1975
Wuthering Heights (Mid)
Emily Brontë · 1846-47 (composed); 1847 (published under pseudonym Ellis Bell)
Moby-Dick (Mid)
Herman Melville · 1850-51
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mid)
Mark Twain · 1876-83 (composed); 1884 (UK); 1885 (US)
The Lord of the Rings (Late)
J. R. R. Tolkien · 1937-49 (composed); 1954-55 (published)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Mid)
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937
Gravity's Rainbow (Mid)
Thomas Pynchon · 1968-72
Canto General (Mid)
Pablo Neruda · 1938-49 (composed in exile and underground); 1950 (Mexico City and Santiago)
Proof of an External World (Late)
G. E. Moore · 1939 (British Academy lecture)
Sense and Sensibilia (Late)
J. L. Austin · 1947-58 (lectures); 1962 (posthumous, reconstructed by G. J. Warnock)
The Analysis of Mind (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1921
The Analysis of Sensations (Mid)
Ernst Mach · 1886 (1st ed.); 1903 (rev. 5th ed.)
Past, Present and Future (Late)
Arthur N. Prior · 1967
God-Christ-Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (Late)
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki · 1989 (rev. ed.; orig. 1982)
The Divine Relativity (Mid)
Charles Hartshorne · 1948 (Yale Terry Lectures 1947)
Nature (Early)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1836
Realism with a Human Face (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 1990
The Quadruple Object (Late)
Graham Harman · 2011
The Structure of Objects (Mid)
Kathrin Koslicki · 2008
Things and Their Parts (Mid)
Kit Fine · 1999
Writing the Book of the World (Mid)
Theodore Sider · 2011 (1st ed.); 2014 (paperback)
Animism: Respecting the Living World (Late)
Graham Harvey · 2005
Capital (Late)
Karl Marx · 1867 (vol. I); 1885 (vol. II posthumous); 1894 (vol. III posthumous, edited by Engels)
Realms of the Human Unconscious (Mid)
Stanislav Grof · 1975
Quantum Healing (Mid)
Deepak Chopra · 1989
Life's Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World (Late (Næss's closing popular statement, written at 86))
Arne Næss · 1998 (Norwegian original Livsfilosofi: Et personlig bidrag om følelser og fornuft, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget); English 2002
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Mature (Lanier's short polemical follow-up to Who Owns the Future?, 2013, and Dawn of the New Everything, 2017))
Jaron Lanier · 2018
Duration and Simultaneity (Mature (the disastrous engagement with Einstein that damaged Bergson's standing among physicists))
Henri Bergson · 1922 (Durée et Simultanéité: à propos de la théorie d'Einstein, Paris: Alcan; revised 2nd edn 1923)
On What Matters (Late (Parfit's final, three-decade-in-the-making work — his second after Reasons and Persons, 1984))
Derek Parfit · 2011 (Vols I & II, Oxford UP); 2017 (Vol III, Oxford UP — published months after Parfit's death)
Miracles: A Preliminary Study (Mature (after Mere Christianity and Screwtape; the most philosophical of Lewis's apologetic works))
C. S. Lewis · 1947 (Bles, London; revised 1960 chapter 3 after Anscombe's 1948 Socratic Club critique)
The American Evasion of Philosophy (Mature (West's major work of intellectual history, written before the Race Matters celebrity))
Cornel West · 1989 (Wisconsin UP)
Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (Early (Spinoza's first published work))
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza · 1663 (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae Pars I et II, Amsterdam: Rieuwertsz)
Divinity School Address (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1838 (delivered July 15, 1838, at Harvard Divinity School; published as An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, 1838)
Song of Solomon (Mid)
Toni Morrison · 1977
Primate Visions (Mid)
Donna Haraway · 1989
Autobiography (Late)
Benjamin Franklin · 1771 (Part 1), 1784 (Part 2), 1788 (Part 3), 1790 (Part 4, unfinished)
New System (Mature)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1695
A Confession (Mid)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1880-82
Ethics for the New Millennium (Late)
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama · 1999
Papers on Time and Tense (Late)
Arthur Norman Prior · 1968
On Cheerfulness (Mature)
Democritus of Abdera · c. 420 BCE
De Motu (Mid)
George Berkeley · 1721
De l'Esprit Géométrique (Mid)
Blaise Pascal · c. 1655
Capital, Volume II (Late)
Karl Marx · c. 1865-78 (drafts); 1885 (Engels-edited publication)
Capital, Volume III (Late)
Karl Marx · c. 1864-75 (drafts); 1894 (Engels-edited publication)
"Relative State" Formulation of Quantum Mechanics
Hugh Everett III · 1957
Symbols of Transformation (Early (the 1912 break-from-Freud book; revised in 1952 as the mature statement of analytical psychology's mythopoeic register))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1912 (revised 1952)
Personas with Naturalism as a declared influence
60% Charles Darwin
55% Sigmund Freud
50% Hippocrates of Cos
40% Willard Van Orman Quine
40% Thales of Miletus
35% Richard Dawkins
35% Anaximander of Miletus
35% Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder)
30% Galileo Galilei
30% David Hume
30% Adam Smith
30% Pierre-Simon Laplace
30% Stephen Hawking
30% Carl Sagan
30% Democritus of Abdera
30% Noam Chomsky
30% Mozi
25% Bertrand Russell
25% Friedrich Nietzsche
25% Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza
25% Virginia Woolf
25% Yuval Noah Harari
25% Diogenes of Sinope (the Cynic)
25% Thomas Hobbes
25% Sir Isaac Newton
25% Peter Singer
25% Robert Hooke
25% Xunzi
25% Karl Popper
25% John Searle
25% Michael Servetus
25% Empedocles of Acragas
25% Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
25% Thucydides
25% Anaximenes of Miletus
25% Leonardo da Vinci
25% Alcmaeon of Croton
20% Thomas Jefferson
20% Albert Einstein
20% Carl Gustav Jung
20% Nick Bostrom
20% Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
20% Alan Turing
20% David Lewis
20% Pelagius
20% Titus Lucretius Carus
20% Al-Jahiz
20% Xenophanes of Colophon
20% Nefertiti
15% William J. Clinton
15% Barack H. Obama
15% Epicurus
15% Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
15% Karl Marx
15% Octavia E. Butler
15% Aldous Huxley
15% Claude Lévi-Strauss
15% David Deutsch
15% William of Ockham
15% Daniel Kahneman
15% Derek Parfit
15% Niels Bohr
15% Robert Stalnaker
15% Zeno of Citium
15% Antisthenes
15% Ctesibius of Alexandria
15% Al-Muqaddasi
15% Gilgamesh Epic (traditional/anonymous)
10% James Earl Carter Jr.
10% Aristotle
10% John Locke
10% Jean-Paul Sartre
10% Simone de Beauvoir
10% Arne Næss
10% Roy Bhaskar
10% John Stuart Mill
10% David J. Chalmers
10% Hugh Everett III
10% Terence McKenna
10% Chrysippus of Soli
10% Posidonius
10% Galen
10% Theophrastus
10% Zhu Xi
10% Han Yu
10% Archimedes of Syracuse
10% Eratosthenes of Cyrene
10% Niccolo Machiavelli
10% Aristarchus of Samos
10% Imhotep
8% Cleanthes
7% Epictetus
5% Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
-10% Muhammad Iqbal
-15% Vine Deloria Jr.
-20% Yukio Mishima
How Naturalism resolves each dilemma
57 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 13 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree
(12/208)
Do you really choose?
If the brain is a physical system and physical systems are governed by laws, then every choice is also a chain of causes — which raises the question of what was really left to choose.
Even if the universe is undetermined, you are not the chooser.
On this view, the indeterminacy of the universe — whether from quantum mechanics, sheer contingency, or something else — does nothing to recover meaningful choice. A coin-flipping brain is not a deliberating brain; randomness in the underlying physics doesn't translate into power for the observer. …
Roads not taken
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. (69%) ·
Choice is structural illusion — every event is fixed by the prior state. (10%) ·
Choice is real within a determined order — agency and determinism aren’t opposites. (10%)
Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree
(12/208)
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Addiction looks from one angle like the textbook case of agency failing — a person doing what they don't, in any meaningful sense, want to do. From another angle it looks like agency at work in hard conditions. Which it is depends on what agency is.
Even if the universe is undetermined, the addict isn't the chooser.
On this view, the indeterminacy of the universe does nothing to convert an addict's brain into a responsible chooser. Randomness is not freedom. The addict is being acted on by neurochemistry, by environment, by craving; the appearance of agency is downstream of these. Compassion is …
Roads not taken
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. (69%) ·
The addict's behaviour is the outcome of causes; 'responsibility' is a useful fiction, not a metaphysical fact. (10%) ·
The addict is genuinely responsible within a determined order. (10%)
Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree
(12/208)
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
When an autonomous AI takes an action that harms someone, the question of who or what is responsible — the developer, the operator, the model itself — turns on whether the model is the kind of thing that can be a responsible agent.
Neither AIs nor anyone else are the locus of free agency; the question is the wrong one.
On this view, the same reasons that undermine ordinary claims of human agency apply with equal force to AI. The brain is a coin-flipping organ; the model is a function on inputs. Neither is the kind of thing that can be the source of action …
Roads not taken
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. (69%) ·
An AI's behaviour is fully determined by training and input; 'responsibility' applies if at all to its makers. (10%) ·
The AI can be a genuine agent within determined conditions — and therefore genuinely responsible. (10%)
6 mainstream positions
How much weight do future people deserve?
Future people are as real as you are — and their interests count for as much.
47%
Is regret rational?
The past is as real as the present; regret is a real attitude toward a real thing.
47%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Extinct species are as real as we are; they have standing.
47%
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing.
47%
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time.
47%
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
Time is unbounded but matter is not; we can owe more across long time than the matter can provide.
47%
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 4 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
Money is a social practice — its content is what we make it.
On this view, money is exactly what societies do that performs the monetary functions. There is no fact about whether something is 'really' money beyond whether it is used as money. A community that decides shell beads or carbon credits or proof-of-work hashes count as …
Roads not taken
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. (55%) ·
Money is the ledger of obligations among real people. (14%) ·
“Money” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
A nation is a constructed polity — a project, not a discovery.
On this view, nations are made: by treaties, by wars, by deliberate institution-building, by the slow work of collective practice. There is nothing intrinsic about a national kind; what exists is the practice. What we owe the nation is what we owe any institution we …
Roads not taken
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. (55%) ·
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people. (14%) ·
“Nation” names a family of practices imaginatively held together. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
Gender is constructed; what counts as male or female reflects practice.
On this view, while biological features exist, what they socially mean — what counts as a man or a woman, what roles attach, how the categories are policed and revised — is the work of social practice. The categories are real but constructed; revising them …
Roads not taken
Sex is a real biological kind with given content. (55%) ·
Sex and gender are constituted by relations of recognition. (14%) ·
“Male” and “female” are family-resemblance terms — no single essence. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
The categories we count as 'human' are emergent from practice; germline editing is a practice-revision like any other.
On this view, biological facts about the genome exist, but what we count as 'human nature' is downstream of practice. The germline is one more thing humans now have technical access to; the question is not whether the practice transgresses an essence but whether the …
Roads not taken
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. (55%) ·
Personhood is constituted by relations of descent and kinship; germline editing reshapes the relational fabric. (14%) ·
'Human nature' is a cluster term without a single essence; the editing question is empirical, not metaphysical. (8%)
3 mainstream positions
Is the world created from nothing?
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance.
56%
Is the physical world fully real?
Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting.
56%
Does matter have intrinsic moral standing?
Matter is morally considerable insofar as it is created or conserved good.
56%
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 11% of schools agree
(22/208)
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
Different traditions take fundamentally different things to be the basic moral-political unit.
The species or biosphere is the moral primary.
The biological species, or the wider community of sentient life, is the moral unit.
Roads not taken
The discrete person is the moral primary. (38%) ·
The community of persons is the moral primary. (28%) ·
The cosmic-religious order is the moral primary. (16%)
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(25/208)
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Subject to a real natural order we did not make.
On these views, nature is a real, ordered, mind-independent reality that we are inside of but did not construct. Our fundamental posture toward it is one of observation, discovery, and humility before laws that are not ours to make. Stewardship and conservation are real obligations, …
Roads not taken
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. (50%) ·
Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world. (15%) ·
Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world. (14%)
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(25/208)
Should we colonize space?
The drive to extend human presence beyond Earth is sometimes framed as the next chapter of stewardship, sometimes as hubris, sometimes as escape from problems we ought to solve here. Which it is depends on what we take our relationship to nature to be.
Nature includes its limits; colonisation is bounded by what the cosmos allows.
On these views, humans operate within a given natural order whose laws and limits set the terms. Space colonisation is fine to the extent that it is actually possible — radiation, gravity wells, biological tolerances — and folly to the extent that it requires denying …
Roads not taken
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. (50%) ·
The 'space frontier' is partly what we make of it. (15%) ·
Colonisation continues the work that ended the wisdom of seven-generation thinking. (14%)
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(25/208)
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Editing the genomes of the plants and animals we eat is either the natural continuation of breeding — careful improvement of what is given — or a category error that treats biology as raw material rather than as living kind.
Biology is what it is; we modify it within real biological constraints.
On these views, organisms are real biological systems with real constraints, and genetic modification is reasonable when it works within those constraints and dangerous when it ignores them. The question is technical: does this modification do what its proponents say, with the unintended consequences they …
Roads not taken
Genetic modification is cultivation by other means. (50%) ·
What counts as a 'natural' genome is itself a construction. (15%) ·
Editing the genome cuts into the relational fabric; we should be very slow. (14%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
A person comes into being gradually, as the capacities of a mind develop.
On this view, personhood is not a status conferred at a moment but a property of beings with certain capacities — to feel, to suffer, to prefer, eventually to reflect. A zygote has none of these; a late-term fetus has many; a newborn has most. …
Roads not taken
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. (55%) ·
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation. (14%) ·
The question presupposes a fact of the matter that isn’t there. (8%)
32 mainstream positions
What is marriage?
Marriage is a practice we shape — its content is what we make it.
16%
Could causation work backwards?
Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural.
68%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction.
68%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description.
68%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation.
66%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Civilizational complexity is hard to build and easy to lose; recovery is at best partial.
66%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
Entropy is what time is. The moral weight, if any, is the weight of working against the current.
66%
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all.
66%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Moral obligation tracks the relations one is in; distance does matter, structurally.
50%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Prayer changes the pray-er, not the prayed-for.
47%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Coincidence is exactly what the math says it is. The pattern is in the noticer.
47%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
The observer is in time; foreknowledge across times raises real freedom problems.
46%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Meditators are bounded observers reporting unusual brain states; the 'timeless' is metaphorical.
46%
Does prayer change God's mind?
If there is an addressee at all, it is in time; prayer is communication, and may genuinely change what comes next.
46%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
Observers are bounded by their own moment, and no further agency makes the dead present.
43%
What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
The category does not apply — the school is non-religious.
42%
What makes someone the same person over time?
You are your body — continuity is bodily continuity.
36%
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Same body, same person — even when the cognitive pattern has changed.
36%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
Different body, different person — you died in the scanner.
36%
Is reality fundamentally digital?
No — continuous fields, classical limits, analog deep structure.
36%
Are there indivisible units of experience?
No — continuous Jamesian stream, phenomenological lived time.
36%
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Reconstructed — continuous re-narrating, no fixed engrams.
36%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
History is not where the deepest truth lives.
36%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
Animal minds are real because biology is the substrate of mind.
31%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Brain tissue can in principle do what brains do; the question is integration.
31%
What happens to "you" when you die?
Death is genuinely the end.
29%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
No — mind is what a biological brain does, and an LLM has no brain.
29%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through controlled empirical investigation.
17%
Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
Liberation is the realization of cosmic or species self.
14%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Trust the method, not the institutions or the persons — and remain wary.
8%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
Revelation is not knowledge in the descriptive-empirical sense.
8%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
An LLM produces tokens; calling that 'knowledge' is a measurement choice.
8%
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone.
50%
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys.
50%
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible.
50%
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away.
50%
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