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Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access originally published online on March 26, 2009
Philosophia Mathematica 2009 17(2):247-271; doi:10.1093/philmat/nkp005
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book Review

A Scientific Enterprise?: Penelope Maddy's Second Philosophy{dagger}

Stewart Shapiro* and Patrick Reeder**

* Department of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, U.S.A.
Arché Research Centre, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland KY16 9AL. shapiro.4@osu.edu
** Department of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, U.S.A. reeder.45@osu.edu

PENELOPE MADDY. Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-927366-9. Pp. xii + 448

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

For almost twenty years, Penelope Maddy has been one of the most consistent expositors and advocates of naturalism in philosophy, with a special focus on the philosophy of mathematics, set theory in particular. Over that period, however, the term ‘naturalism’ has come to mean many things. Although some take it to be a rejection of the possibility of a priori knowledge, there are philosophers calling themselves ‘naturalists’ who willingly embrace and practice (what they take to be) an a priori methodology, not a whole lot different from traditional conceptual analysis. Along a different line, some take naturalism to involve the rejection of abstract objects—a sort of physicalism—while other naturalists not only allow the existence of abstracta; they take this existence to be all but obvious.

For present purposes, we can begin with W.V.O. Quine, who once characterized naturalism as ‘the abandonment of the goal of first philosophy’ and ‘the recognition . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   1. Historical Contrasts
 

   2. Truth: Language and the World
 

   3. Logic
 

   4. Mathematics; Set Theory
 

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