This chapter offers an account of literature’s intervention in the money debates of the early twentieth-century United States. It explores the corrosive effects of banking crises and the fear of corrupt trusts through the realist anti-banking novels of writers such as Upton Sinclair; the persistent social shibboleths of gold versus paper money in the naturalism of Edith Wharton and Frank Norris; the teleological failures of speculation depicted in the caricatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and the possibilities and limitations of the crisis that precipitated the New Deal, as suggested by the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. The chapter also explores, through the writing of Mina Loy, the alternative money debates that were receiving increased attention in this period.

This chapter traces the development of an economic sublime associated with modern neoclassical economics. A precursor to Fredric Jameson’s postmodern “hysterical sublime,” the sublimity of neoclassical economics derived from the thrilling sense that, through math, economics could access vast and terrifying universal forces, and connect individuals directly to them. However, the most popular expression of the economic sublime was not mathematical but literary, and consisted primarily of naturalist novels that chronicled human encounters with economic laws allegedly so regular, universal, and inexorable that they amounted to a new branch of physics. Through readings of novels by Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Frank Norris, this chapter shows how literature helped train readers to understand neoclassical economics not just as natural, but also as an indispensable source of romantic pleasure.

This chapter considers Heidegger’s “two-handedness” on the issue of realism versus idealism: on the one hand, an apparent realism about entities, while on the other, an apparent idealism about being. Interpreters tend to resolve the tensions such two-handedness engenders by giving one side or the other the upper hand. Kantian approaches to Heidegger privilege idealism, other readings favor realism. The latter readings neglect Heidegger’s own rather mocking remarks directed at those who fear idealism as “the foul fiend incarnate” and favor instead what he calls a “blind realism.” Properly understood, such remarks point toward a position beyond both realism and idealism, a position akin to, but importantly different from, Quine’s naturalism. Quine’s imagery of “working from within” and “mutual containment” provide models for a more evenhanded approach to the issue of realism and idealism. Moreover, they help us to understand Heidegger’s principal aim of rejecting both positions.

Starting with George Lukacs’ complaint that naturalist works are incoherent because of their superfluous detail, this chapter argues that incoherence was in fact an effective literary aesthetic for seeing and managing details at a large scale. The large scale that was particularly salient to American naturalism was the global one of American imperial expansion during the Progressive Era, and the essay argues that American empire is a useful framework for understanding naturalism as a literary movement because it brought together an investment in incoherent form with statistical and biopolitical technologies that, like naturalist works, proliferated details. Naturalism in this American context isn’t a failed version of realism. Nor does its incoherence register an inability to represent empire as an emergent global order. Instead, naturalism developed the realist project with a set of conventions that powerfully (and problematically) expressed the form of an emerging and efficacious large-scale global order.

Nineteenth-century debates over realism were particularly intense in France, where they were part of a struggle against the dominance of classical idealism. These debates, and the major realist literary works of the period, largely focused on metropolitan areas, often Paris itself. From Balzac onwards, however, several strands of French realism sought to embed storytelling in dense description whose signification, branching out through metonymy, often included connections with the French colonies. So-called realist writers, meanwhile, often also wrote ‘exotic’ texts in which they sought to problematize the nature of realism itself or apply a realist gaze to the wider world. Realism’s later variant, naturalism, portrays characters whose behavior is largely determined by materialist, predominantly biological factors. While it generally focuses on specific metropolitan milieux, naturalism was a source of inspiration for colonial literature from the 1880s onwards. Realist observation can serve as a tool for political writing of many kinds and remains a resource drawn on by later writers, including postcolonial Francophone authors.

The chapter starts with an impasse in criminal justice theory between liberal normative and critical historical accounts to consider a new way of developing critique. This is based on the idea of human beings as metaphysical animals, that is, animals capable of thought and love. Starting with Bernard Williams’s account of the ‘peculiar’ nature of modern ethics, a moral psychology based on a naturalistic understanding of what human beings are would be a better way of thinking about what it means to violate or be violated by another. Basing our understanding of violation on what it means to be human takes us to ontology and to ontological critique as a pivotal moment in a sequence of four critiques, moving from immanent to explanatory to ontological and then to emancipatory. This provides the possibility of a further ethically real/ institutionally critical (ERIC) position which brings together ontological naturalism, ethical realism and institutional critique. How love was identified as the immanent starting point for the argument is explained. The upshot of this fivefold form of critique is a move in the course of the book away from punishment and towards what I call a deep or tendential abolitionist position.

This chapter examines the unstable intellectual situation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, in which an abstract conception of the Hegelian subject–object that had allegedly been naturalized by Feuerbach into the pair human–nature jostles, on the one hand, with a recognition on Marx’s part of a historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach but which had already been present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, on the other, with an emerging familiarity with radical politics. Marx’s conception of the human as Gattungswesen, the basis of a communism that as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, is still indebted to that of Feuerbach. At the same time, he is developing his own conception of the human that resolutely carries Aristotle’s theory of soul through into the case of rational soul where Aristotle himself suffered a failure of nerve.

Experimental physiology was exploited as a metaphor and a model for the work of authors and critics. The final two chapters advance the book’s trajectory which takes in increasingly diverse literary forms and traces how vivisection became loosened from its ethical and political contexts. Chapter 7 studies how Émile Zola and August Strindberg drew up principles of naturalism by fashioning themselves as literary vivisectors and presenting the stage and the novel as sites of experimentation. They did so by interrogating the connection between observation and intervention and by cultivating an attitude of objective absence imported from experimental physiology. By reframing their works within the context of the vivisection debates (to which naturalism was deeply indebted), the chapter offers a reconsideration of how these writers sought to uncover physiological and psychological laws that would make literature entirely scientific.

This chapter explains how the distinction between physical and metaphysical cosmologies contributed to the rise of modern democracy. Ezrahi argues that the division of Nature from God and Culture has created a space for human agency and democratic practices. This dichotomy has also facilitated the alliance between science and democracy, with science gaining authority in representing Nature in relation to societal norms. The text further discusses the imposition of Western cosmologies on non-Western societies under the guise of modernization. It references the work of anthropologist Philippe Descola, who categorizes cosmologies based on configurations of physicalities and interiorities, identifying four types: totemism, analogism, animism, and naturalism. The chapter also explores how these different cosmologies manifest in various societies globally. It emphasizes the transformative impact of modern science on societal beliefs and commonsense, highlighting the role of encyclopedias and dictionaries in this transformation process. The global influence of Western science and technology is also discussed, particularly their perceived neutrality and universality. It also notes how different cosmologies often borrow elements from each other, often stripped of their original context. Lastly, it touches upon the presence of animism in Western childhood culture.

Field research refers to research conducted with a high degree of naturalism. The first part of this chapter provides a definition of field research and discusses advantages and limitations. We then provide a brief overview of observational field research methods, followed by an in-depth overview of experimental field research methods. We discuss randomization schemes of different types in field experimentation, such as cluster randomization, block randomization, and randomized rollout or waitlist designs, as well as statistical implementation concerns when conducting field experiments, including spillover, attrition, and noncompliance. The second part of the chapter provides an overview of important considerations when conducting field research. We discuss the psychology of construal in the design of field research, conducting non-WEIRD field research, replicability and generalizability, and how technological advances have impacted field research. We end by discussing career considerations for psychologists who want to get involved in field research.

As architectural images became vehicles for natural philosophical thinking and practices, they also challenged certain conventions of architectural design. Dietterlin’s Architectura upended enduring principles of architectural naturalism and stability promoted in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria by developing a genre of amorphous ornaments that resembled the internal forms of the human body while effacing the conventional distinctions between architectural structure and surface, interior and exterior. Dietterlin derived these corporeal ornaments from empirically oriented images such as anatomical flap prints and the woodcuts of Vesalius’s De corporis fabrica. As architects and artists in northern Europe adopted the Architectura’s anatomical ornaments, they revealed the limits of architectural naturalism. Paradoxically, the waxing role of architectural images as tools for studying and embodying nature destabilized architecture’s long-standing traditions of naturalistic design.

In contrast to what several recent interpreters suggest, Hegel would reject the labels “naturalism,” “essentialist naturalism,” and “naturalist essentialism” for his philosophy. In light of the architecture of his system, the label “essentialist naturalism” would commit him to a variety of physicalism, which he rejects on the grounds of physics’ inability to establish the compatibility of material bodies and physical form. Second, as his critique of nature’s most concrete category “the death of the individual animal” and the sublation of nature into Geist illustrate, Hegel deems nature incapable of reconciling the individuals’ particularity with the genus’ universality, and therefore associates the realm of nature with death and proceeds to sublate nature into the concept of Geist. Finally, pointing out the inability of objectivist essentialist metaphysics to consistently unite the universal with the particular, Hegel also rejects the metaphysics of “naturalist essentialism” and proposes a concept-metaphysical account of the relationship between the logical idea, nature, and Geist. As all of these are variations of the idea, this proves him to be an idealist rather than a naturalist or a spiritualist.

Moral philosophy can be divided into two major fields: metaethics, which concerns the meaning and status of moral language, and normative ethics, which centers on what we ought to do. An ancient controversy in metaethics is that between moral realism, the view that moral language states facts about the world, and moral subjectivism, the view that moral language expresses the attitudes of speakers. Moral language seems to have both the characteristics of fact-stating discourse as well as some of the characteristics of expressions of attitudes. The challenge of metaethics is to reconcile the object-relatedness of realism with the motivational insight of subjectivism. Such a view must hold that valuing is contextual, object-directed, and constrained by biology, psychology, and history. Such a view is demonstrated through an investigation of the concept of intrinsic value.