Liberal Naturalism and the Question of Metaphysics

Liberal naturalism has been widely misunderstood as a "middle" position situated between scientific naturalism on the one side and supernaturalism on the other. That (mis)characterization treats liberal naturalism as a form of "mild" metaphysics: a commitment to a more "liberal" ontology than reductive scientism; but one less expansive than supernaturalism (e.g. theism). I argue against this Ontology-centered understanding of the movement. Properly understood, liberal naturalism is fundamentally skepticism of metaphysics in any of its forms, including scientific naturalism and supernaturalism. Since metaphysics is a denigration or denial of the "appearances" – what Sellars called "the manifest image" of the world – then liberal naturalism is the recovery of the manifest image of the world and, in particular, the self to which this image is manifest. The self is not a scientific concept; in the last section, I argue that common sense (or "folk") psychology is not proto-science. What understanding others requires is not science or metaphysics but what I call an "aesthetics of understanding others."