Essential Characteristics of Naturalism in Western Contemporary Philosophy

Naturalism is a philosophical approach within the tradition of analytic philosophy, which has been one of the dominant trends in analytic philosophy during the last three decades of the twentieth century. From the point of view of many naturalists, naturalism is not only a philosophical approach, but at the same time as an "ideology" and a leading factor in the entire tradition of analytic philosophy. However, the answer to the question of "what is naturalism?" Has been with many challenges. Some philosophers find it useless to attempt to formulate naturalism and its definition, and try to formulate naturalism in the context of dialogues between naturalistic and anti-naturalist philosophers in different fields. On the other hand, others do not consider naturalism as a coherent philosophical doctrine, but rather as a research program, which is a combination of methodological approaches or the method of conducting research. Both of these approaches have encountered shortcomings. Our goal in this article is to formulate naturalism based on its basic characteristics. Based on this formulation, the naturalism of combined teachings is of two major characteristics: scientism and avoidance of supernatural. The characteristic of scientism, manifests itself in the approach to avoiding the prior knowledge prior to science, and evolutionism approach to man, life, mind, nature, etc. .The characteristic of avoiding supernatural manifests itself in two components of ontological naturalism and methodological naturalism.