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The Comeback of Natural Philosophy. Essay Review of Penelope Maddy, A Plea for Natural Philosophy and Other Essays

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The potential readers of Penelope Maddy's latest book ('A Plea' hereafter) form a set that can be divided into two disjunct subsets: those who are familiar with her naturalist agenda (e.g., Maddy 1997, 2007 or 2017), and those who are not.Regardless of which of these readers she had in mind when selecting the essays included in A Plea, one message I hope this review conveys is that members of both subsets will benefit from perusing it.This is a truly good book, with much to learn from it.In a manner characteristic of Maddy, A Plea is philosophically (and meta-philosophically) rich, visionary, and consistently very well-written.It contains a good deal of philosophy of mathematics and logic, as expected (essays 7-11), and also stimulating reflections on naturalism and philosophical method (essay 1 and 2), on philosophy of language (especially on truth and reference; essay 6), on several historical figures (Hume, Reid, Kantessay 3) and on skepticism (Moore, Wittgenstein, Austinessays 4 and 5).Moreover, the second essay is an illuminating intervention in general philosophy of science, specifically on the venerable realism v. antirealism debate.Overall, the work updates, clarifies, and adds to views Maddy has been advocating for almost three decades now; in some cases, the arguments in A Plea are meant to supersede them.More specifically, this book's essays supplant large parts of Maddy's well-known Second Philosophy (2007) roughly as follows.Essays 3, 4, and 5 (together with What do Philosophers do? (Maddy 2017)) largely supersede Part I of Second Philosophy (on skepticism) while essay 6 (on truth and reference) is a successor of some of the material in Part II.Essays 8 and 9 significantly update
DOI: 10.1017/psa.2025.10191
Author: Sorin Bangu
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7126193783
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