17 Naturalism versus Philosophy? Adriano Naves de Brito With regard to the relationship of philosophy and the empirical sciences, we have remarked that philosophy does not in any way compete with the sciences. It does not make any speculative assertions which could conflict with the speculative assertions of science, nor does it profess to venture into fields which lie beyond the scope of scientific investigation. Only the metaphysician does that, and produces nonsense as a result 1 . There seems to be something odd about being a philosopher and a naturalist, since if science can give an account of every aspect of the world, then what is the point of doing philosophy? And if philosophy is not concerned with giving an account of the world, what is the point of being a naturalist in philosophy? The formulation is paradoxical enough to make us suspect that it means more than it conveys at the first glance. But because each of its conditionals points to something generally accepted, the astonishing effect of the sentence remains. Indeed, on the one hand, science, for reasons irrelevant here – and probably impossible to exhaust – has become, in the twentieth century, the sole oracle for questions concerning the world and its furnishings. While of course not compulsory, this view entails a kind of naturalism which professes that everything in existence exists within the realm of nature, and that beyond nature there is nothing. 1 AYER, 1936, p.168.