Reexamination of philosophical naturalism

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After the reexamination of historical heritage of philosophical thinkings about naturalism, we thematized and studied contemporary debates on philosophical naturalism. The important results are as follows.(1) Against the dominant thesis, the naturalistic epistemology can account for aprioristic knowledge on the basis of the ideas of implicit understanding and imaginary connection of concepts.(2) The notion of color, which has been left to physical explanations without philosophical approach, can be proved to have a multidimensionality inaccessible to naturalistic reduction, reffering to phenomenological and Wittgensteinian opinions.(3) The anti-naturalistic position is defendable by showing that the eccessive naturalism or the philosophical skepticism is the doublet of the philosophical foundationalism or the strong demand of justification, and that both of them presuppose the experiences of "immanence" of freedom, rationality, truth or justice in the practical world of humankind.(4) In the late philosophy of Wittgenstein too, we can find a transcendental naturalism which situates meanings and norms in the human practice of "natural history".(5) We tried to clarify the limits of naturalism, in studying the situation of "ethics" in the history of Japanese thought and the possibility of "public philosophy" in the contemporary world.