Fellow naturalist here, what’s the best theory for what came before the Big Bang? Better than “nothing turned into something”. Also, what is the best naturalist explanation for the fine tuned nature of our universe?

This lecture series (link: https://youtu.be/TVqIWnhi2-A) did not originate as a conventional academic article. It emerged first as a long-form video project, and it is precisely this trajectory that motivates its presentation here.

What I am doing in bringing it to an academic audience is not translating popular content into scholarly form, but testing whether a sustained philosophical argument - developed through a different medium and rhythm - can be re-entered into academic discussion without losing its conceptual rigor.

The philosophical ambition of the project remains traditional. I am not proposing a new thesis about Quine, but revisiting a familiar cluster of positions that academic debates often bracket or isolate. The interest lies in tracing a continuous interpretive path through Quine’s work, rather than extracting a single doctrinal claim.

What I find in Quine is the construction of decision mechanisms shaped by historical pressures and gradually transformed into paradigmatic bases for communication and prediction. His image of the Neurathian boat captures this continuity: a structure extending from common sense to science, revised from within.

This reading leads to a phenomenological layer within Quine’s naturalism — not a transcendental phenomenology, but a system of immanent idealities: shared paradigms, norms of normal judgment, folk psychology, and folk semantics that stabilize interpretation among radical interpreters, even when multiple true theories of meaning remain compatible with the same underdetermining facts.

What interests me is that this phenomenology is not eliminated by naturalism, but filtered through it. Meaning and intentionality persist as functionally stabilized structures, shaped by learning, selection, and survival, rather than grounded in a priori necessity.

The project is presented here in that spirit: as an attempt to see what becomes visible when a philosophical argument is allowed to move between media, and whether Quine’s naturalism offers a framework flexible enough to account for that movement itself.

If you give it a chance, Thanks for waching!

https://youtu.be/TVqIWnhi2-A

why don't we just believe that the law of nature is the one who rules and governs the entirely universe? why we have to praise something if we—us to ourselves is the one who thinks and wonders that gave meaning to the world? that everything is whether subjective or objectively phenomenon? and just appreciate the beauty of cosmos and its connection with the human being.

https://www.scribd.com/document/730039460/Naturalism-and-the-Human-Spirit-Naturalism-in-America

One of my favorite pieces on naturalism. It discusses the historical development of naturalism as the culture in the New World America rejected theistic influences in favor of industrialism and materialism. This gave room for American intellectuals to explore a metaphysics not bound to theology. The rise of science then solidified the supremacy of this new metaphysical outlook.

I’ve had a recent discussion with a Muslim about the religious and philosophical views of the world, and when I mentioned I was atheist he brought up that it’s not really a religion but really only the rejection of the idea of god. It opened my eyes that being atheist/agnostic was not really benefitting my views on life and just saying “god isn’t real and we should just live” isn’t enough for me. I realized I wanted an actual philosophical view to live by and to understand the world in a deeper way. Which led me to finding naturalism. I’ve always loved nature, I think it’s a pretty spectacular phenomena in of itself and am willing to adopt/learn more about this philosophical view. I know this sub isn’t very active currently, but I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for any works on naturalism to further educate my knowledge on this view? Thank you.

Interesting book for naturalists, if someone is open to discuss it here!