When naturalisms collide: Neural representations as scientific posits and metaphysical entities

Part IV turns to an extended engagement with the academic study of religion, which is often constitutively hostile to any form of theology. Chapter 12 considers the place of “naturalism” and “reductionism” in the academic study of religion. While individual scholars of religion can—and often should—practice methodological naturalism, attempts to justify methodological naturalism as a global, field-defining norm inevitably presuppose controversial metaphysical claims, and thereby collapse into ontological naturalism—a position that I call “ontological naturalism on the cheap.” The chapter concludes that any barriers to including analytic theology in the wider field of religious studies are local and prudential, not global and methodological.

In this article I dispute the claim, made by several contemporary scholars, thatSpinoza was a naturalist. ‘Naturalism’ here refers to two distinct but related positions in contemporary philosophy. The first, ontological naturalism, is the view that everything that exists possesses a certain character (variously defined) permitting it to be defined as natural and prohibiting it from being defined as supernatural. I argue that the only definition of ontological naturalism that could be legitimately applied toSpinoza's philosophy is so unrestrictive as to tell us nothing about the content of his ideas. The second, methodological naturalism, is the view that the natural sciences are the best means of finding out substantial truths about the concrete world. I present some historical research showing thatSpinoza's way of positioning himself with respect to other philosophers in theDutchRepublic casts very serious doubt on the claim that he was a methodological naturalist. This adds further weight to arguments that have already been made against the naturalist reading ofSpinoza.

Received concepts of neural activity, building on the technical concepts of information processing and coding, do not formulate the problems that an organism must formulate in order to cope with its environment. Specifically, this includes the problems of self-maintenance and adaptation, and how such activities are to be monitored and corrected in case of their (anticipated) deviation from viable norms. In this paper, it is shown how the functional systems theory of P. K. Anokhin formulated key notions of adaptive control, self-monitoring, and self-detectable (“system-detectable”) error that directly anticipate current debates on neural information and representation, and allow to reframe these debates in new empirical and theoretical perspectives. In addition to showing this on the basis of early (less known and untranslated) works, we analyze how functional systems pose new questions for current research. Specifically, recent discoveries in integrative and cellular neuroscience regarding the biophysical limits of signal summation in neural cells directly confirm Anokhin’s analysis of the integrative activities of the neuron. These findings may have wide implications, and call for new and biologically more specific models of the integrative and semiotic closure of nervous activity, in line with the systemic closure of the organismic functions in which they participate.