Methodological Naturalism and Reflexivity Requirement

Methodological naturalists regard scientific method as the only effective way of acquiring knowledge. Quite the contrary, traditional analytic philosophers reject employing scientific method in philosophy as illegitimate unless it is justified by the traditional methods. One of their attacks on methodological naturalism is the objection that it is either incoherent or viciously circular: any argument that may be offered for methodological naturalism either employs a priori methods or involves a vicious circle that ensues from employing the very method that the argument is aimed to show its credentials. The charge of circularity has also been brought against the naturalistic arguments for specific scientific methods; like the inductive argument for induction and the abductive argument for the inference to the best explanation. In this paper, I respond to the charge of circularity using a meta-methodological rule that I call ‘reflexivity requirement.’ Giving two examples of philosophical works, I illustrate how the requirement has already been considered to be necessary for self-referential theories. At the end, I put forward a meta-philosophical explanation of the naturalism-traditionalism debate over the legitimate method of philosophy.

Sergey Rubinstein on Hegel’s Method of Thinking: a Neo-Kantian Criticism

In this research I focuse on Sergey L. Rubinstein’s German dissertation “A Study on the Problem of Method” (1913–1914), which aimed at solving the problem of method in transcendental philosophy as distinguished from Hegel’s philosophy and dualistic philosophical systems. After a brief description of the context in which this problem emerged in the 1910s, I reconstruct its general original in­tent from the archive copy of the dissertation. Further I show that the published part of Rubinstein’s study was the first serious attempt to explain the difference between the transcendental logic of Cohen and Natorp and what the Neo-Kan­tians called Hegel’s “absolute rationalism”. This issue has become one of the most difficult questions in the philosophical self-reflection of Marburg Neo-Kantianism. I reveal that in his critique of Hegel Rubinstein is based on the Co­hen’s thesis on the immanence of thinking and being, which means that all being in sense of its substantive determination is a function of thinking. In Hegel’s “Science of Logic” Rubinstein finds a violation of this principle, namely dualis­tic features expressed in the independence of being and thinking. From Rubin­stein’s further reflections it becomes clear that his critical thesis against Hegel about the transcendence of being in relation to all other logical definitions is ori­ented on Cohen’s conception of the last ground and his own project of an open system of categories. However, Rubinstein has overlooked that the epistemologi­cal differences between the concept and the object of the concept, thinking and being, are overcome on the last pages of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” by the concept of absolute knowledge, and “The Science of Logic” is a theory of pure thinking which seeks to justify the substantivity of thinking on the basis of a methodological rule, by means of which both the difference of being and think­ing, and their unity with the concept of pure thinking are revealed simultaneously.