The Ordinary is Extraordinary; The Wonder of the Mundane Physical World
Keywords
Philip Kitcher, secular naturalism, the transcendent, normatively, sensations, consciousness, the mental, the physicalAbstract
Philip Kitcher and other secular naturalists assert that we have a problem-free concept of the "mundane physical world" and use the idea of our familiar material world to critique those who recognize a transcendent reality as in theism. It is argued that the naturalist's concept of the world faces problems involving the primacy of the mental, normativity, sensations and consciousness, and contemporary science. A closing section suggests, contra secular naturalism, that our experience of the mundane world can be suffused with a sense of the transcendent, as we find in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. This conclusion is supported by reference to other work.
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