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What is Real and Materialistic Monism
Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (Eerdmans: May 23, 2008), 132 pages.
Most, if not all, other books on naturalism are written for
professional philosophers alone. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro
offer a book that — without losing anything in the way of scholarly
standards — is primarily aimed at a college-educated audience
interested in learning about this pervasive worldview. Naturalism
groups the various terms of this philosophy into two general
categories: strict naturalism and broad naturalism. According to the
strict version, all that exists can be exhaustively described and
explained by the natural sciences. As Goetz and Taliaferro explain it,
broad naturalism allows that there may be some things beyond physics
and the natural sciences, but insists that there can be no reality
beyond nature — i.e., God — and explicitly rules out the possibility of
souls. The authors argue that both categories face substantial
objections in their failure to allow for consciousness, human free
will, and values. They offer sustained replies to the naturalist
critique of the soul and the existence of God and engage in critical
evaluations of works by scholarly and popular advocates of naturalism —
Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Nagel, Jaegwon Kim, and others.
