Giving Naturalism a Chance: Interactivism, Emergence, and Nonlinearity

Abstract

This paper offers a defense of naturalism, which might improve its chance of being adopted as a direction, both for theory and for empirical research. This defense responds in particular to three themes:: the emergence of mind (as opposed to nonemergence or reductionism), the pervasiveness of nonlinearity in biology and psychology, and the need for levels and degrees of self (as opposed to a human self that is self-evidently unitary, or a self that turns out to be illusory, or a concealment of what is truly there).