Michael McLeod

In this thesis I argue for aspirational naturalism. Aspirational naturalism is a metaphilosophical thesis that encourages a continuation of the interdisciplinary relationship between philosophy and science. It is a kind of methodological naturalism, a view about philosophical methodology that treats science with epistemic respect.

We argue that Maclaurin and Dyke's recent critique of non-naturalistic metaphysics suffers from difficulties analogous to those that caused trouble for earlier positivist critiques of metaphysics. Maclaurin and Dyke say that a theory is naturalistic iff it has observable consequences. Depending on the details of this criterion, either no theory counts as naturalistic or every theory does.