Bird: Natural kinds and their metaphysics
In this paper I explore the metaphysics of natural kinds. I ask what a belief in the reality of natural kinds amounts to, whether they have essences, and whether their having essences requires them to exist. I then ask to what degree the metaphysics of natural kinds has been naturalized. Post Kripke, it may be thought that certain metaphysically necessary truths are discovered a posteriori by science, and so to this extent metaphysics has been naturalized. I contrast this with Jonathan Lowe’s neo-Aristotelian account of kinds, which gives a more limited role for science in revealing the metaphysics of natural kinds.

Kornblith: The metaphysical status of knowledge
The question of whether knowledge is a natural phenomenon, or a ¿natural kind, has recently become a topic of some controversy. But just ¿what does it mean to assert, or to deny, that knowledge is a natural ¿phenomenon? How would we go about resolving this issue? This paper attempts to clarify these issues.

Lowe: The Metaphysical foundations of natural science
Far from it being the case that metaphysics and natural science are incompatible with one another, to the detriment of the former, or that only a "naturalistic" metaphysics that defers to the authority of natural science is possible, natural science depends -- whether its practitioners are aware of the fact or not -- on metaphysical presuppositions which cannot be either defended or criticized merely by using the methods of natural science itself. One of the central tasks of metaphysics is to provide natural science with cogent foundations, in the absence of which its intellectual authority would wither away.

Audsen: Churchland’s phenomenological materialism
Could an internalization of theories of the brain sciences help guide self-conceptions more penetrating than any conception based on our current mental concepts and psychological theories? Since his Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979) Paul Churchland has argued that it could. My approach to Churchland’s phenomenological materialism will be by way of his metaepistemology. Although one might find flaws in Churchland’s arguments, the common philosopher’s dismissal of his radical materialism bars us from an intellectually tantalizing metaepistemology. Admittedly, his views on how the brain sciences are likely to influence our self-conception fall short of consistent subtlety. While reconstructing Churchland’s materialism, a sketch of how “descriptive” analyses of the structure of the human mind complement naturalistic ones will materialize.

Dybvig: Metaphysics in the philosophy of mind
A distinction is made between descriptive-phenomenological, naturalistic and specifically metaphysical approaches to problems in the philosophy of mind. It is argued that all three approaches must be combined if we are to develop a satisfactory theory of mind (which must be some kind of non-physicalist or perhaps dualist theory!)

Knowles: Is naturalism a threat to metaphysics?
It is sometimes suggested that advances in science, both physical and psychological, have rendered traditional metaphysical inquiry into categories of space, time, freedom and so on otiose. At the same time, many contemporary naturalists are concerned with metaphysical issues relating to science, such as natural kind realism, the nature of properties and so on. Is there any reason to see a tension between such enquiry and a commitment to naturalism? I argue it depends on what one understands by naturalism. Quine’s web of belief model with its doctrine of gradualism is often held up by naturalistic philosophers as the epistemological background to their enquiries. Although it raises prima facie worries about the idea of metaphysics, there is indeed little in Quine’s model to worry a natuaralistically-inclined metaphysician. However, the web of belief model has serious short-comings which when corrected for reveal deeper tenions between what could reasonably be called metaphysics and a commitment to naturalism.

Myhre: Naturalism and the metaphysics of emergence
Although the notion of emergence seems to play an increasingly important role in the psychobiological sciences, it seems that many philosophers, notably Jaegwon Kim, are highly sceptical of its compatibility with the main tenets of naturalism. It is especially the invocation of whole-part causation made by emergentists that Kim finds magical because it is in conflict with the principle of causal closure. However, the relation that holds between emergent systems and its constituent parts is not one of nonidentity. Emergentism is not dualism. After exploring an alternative notion of emergence I argue that it is only a robust theory of emergence that can give a plausible account of the relationship between mental content and neural mechanisms. The last section is a short presentation of an account of emergence of form in living systems that will be elaborated in a future work.

Wyller: How big? How fast? Reflections on space, time, and global models
A version of transcendental idealism is defended, to the effect that man is not just a part of the natural world. We also constitute the natural world as structured in space and time: The occurrence of global models in human life show that we have propositional knowledge of the singular size of spatial objects, and only as related to embodied epistemic subjects do natural objects have such size. As for the singular temporal extension of events, it is claimed that it is human too - albeit in a different way. It is no conceivable object of propositional, only of practical knowledge.