1 Actualism as a Form of Liberal Naturalism Paul Redding 1. What’s in a Name? The liberal naturalist, we are told, seeks an inclusive philosophical position beyond scientific naturalism, and in this respect, the adjective ‘liberal’ seems particularly apt. Thus, among the various meanings for the term ‘liberal’ to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary are: “directed to a general intellectual enlargement and refinement”, “not narrowly restricted to the refinements of technical or professional training” and “free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid” (Simpson and Weiner 2004, vol 8, 881-882). The other concept central to the dictionary meaning of ‘liberal’ is that of freedom, as is found in the original sense of “those ‘arts’ or ‘sciences’ that were ‘worthy of a free man’; opposed to servile or mechanical” (ibid.). Now, abstracting away from the class- and gender-ridden idea of a liberal culture deemed the appropriate domain of the leisured gentleman, I take it that such a link to freedom also recommends the adjective ‘liberal’ to the liberal naturalist as well. This is because the ontology favored by the rival scientific naturalist can be seen as incapable of finding a place for us human beings in terms resembling those in which we otherwise understand ourselves, for example, as beings capable of something like free agency or self- determination. Now traditionally, idealism has been thought to offer some kind of a counter to scientific naturalism along these lines, but I suspect that the liberal naturalist might assume that the idealist is committed to the type of supernaturalism to which she is equally opposed. Thus, liberal naturalism is, we are told, “a philosophical outlook lying between scientific naturalism and supernaturalism” (De Caro and Macarthur 2015). The liberal naturalist wants to account for intentional human beings without reference to “the supernatural, whether in the form of entities (such as God, spirits, entelechies, or Cartesian minds), events (such as miracles or magic), or epistemic faculties (such as mystical insight or spiritual intuition)” (De Caro and Macarthur 2010, 3). I don’t believe that idealism—at least the type of idealism espoused by Hegel—was in fact a supernaturalist doctrine, but I won’t be arguing for that thesis here. The account of actualism I will present here derives from quite different sources,