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 opening section on philosophical method. The second section, on external world skepticism, is largely historical: an essay comparing the naturalistic credentials of Hume and Reid, then one each on Moore and Wittgenstein. A second-philosophical examination of debates over truth and reference, starring J. L. Austin, opens the section on language and logic, followed by a broad-brush description of historical landmarks in the philosophy of logic and an executive summary of the Second Philosopher's view. The concluding section on mathematics begins with an essay addressed to undergraduates on the ontology of number and another assessing the bearing of contemporary developmental psychology on the philosophies of logic and arithmetic. The concluding essay is an attempt to revive the often-ridiculed if-thenist position in the philosophy of mathematics.

Maddy's second-philosophical essays offer new insight into long-standing questions in the philosophy of science, epistemology, the philosophies of language, logic, mathematics-all with an eye to the methodological themes that connect them.

A welcome addition to Maddy's project of articulating Second Philosophy. The breadth and depth of her investigations, including forays into the history and philosophy of early modern science and philosophy, questions about the proper direction and methods of philosophy of science, the relation between ordinary language philosophy and the sciences, and extensive interpretation and analysis of questions in philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics, inspire awe. Maddy has the curiosity and philosophical acumen that are so fully on display in the Second Philosopher. She embodies an integrated history and philosophy of science that is informed by actual science and extracts its philosophical frameworks from the investigation of real cases. I commend the volume to a broad audience, whose members find themselves curious about the various topics as described.

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