non-naturalism
|non-nat-u-ral-ism|
🇺🇸
/ˌnɑnˈnætʃərəlɪzəm/
🇬🇧
/ˌnɒnˈnætʃ(ə)rəlɪz(ə)m/
rejection of naturalistic explanation
Etymology
'non-naturalism' originates from English, specifically the prefix 'non-' + the noun 'naturalism', where 'non-' meant 'not' and 'naturalism' meant 'the doctrine that everything arises from natural properties or causes.'
'non-naturalism' was formed in modern philosophical English by combining the negating prefix 'non-' with 'naturalism'; the compound gained currency in 19th- and 20th-century debates in meta-ethics and the philosophy of mind as a label for positions opposing naturalistic accounts.
Initially it simply signified opposition to 'naturalism'; over time it became specialized in contexts such as meta-ethics to denote the claim that moral properties are ontologically non-natural and irreducible to natural properties.
Meanings by Part of Speech
Noun 1
in meta-ethics, the position that moral properties (for example, 'good' or 'wrong') are not reducible to natural properties (such as pleasure, desire, or physical states); moral facts are non-natural and often understood as sui generis and knowable by intuition or rational insight.
Non-naturalism maintains that moral properties cannot be fully explained in terms of natural properties or empirical science.
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Noun 2
more broadly in philosophy, any doctrine that rejects naturalistic explanations for certain phenomena (for example aspects of mind, morality, or consciousness) and posits non-natural or sui generis properties or causes.
Some versions of non-naturalism in the philosophy of mind argue that conscious experience involves non-natural properties not captured by neuroscience.
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Last updated: 2025/11/08 15:07