A Plea for Natural Philosophy

The philosopher Penelope Maddy is well-known for her pursuit of 'Second Philosophy', a form of naturalism that sees the methods of philosophy as indistinguishable from those of the empirical sciences. This volume collects eleven of her recent essays (five new and six reprinted), exploring a wide range of philosophical topics—from methodology, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, to the philosophies of logic, arithmetic, and higher mathematics. Though the topics vary widely, each essay bears in one way or another on the description, exploration, or application of Second Philosophy, revealing the underlying systematic character of Maddy's thought. The title essay traces the source of second-philosophical thinking to the 'natural philosophy' of the early modern period, when 'science' and 'philosophy' weren't separate disciplines; a companion essay, drawing second-philosophical morals for the realism/instrumentalism debate in the philosophy of science rounds out the...