Comments on 'Spirituality and nursing: a reductionist approach' by John Paley.

When you visit John Paley’s page on the University of Sterling’s web site, a kindly face will beam forth, a face that looks like it belongs to someone who, a few decades ago, would have been hoping to usher in the age of Aquarius, and who can still play a mean bass guitar in an old codger rock band. And yet, this is the same John Paley who, in an impressive body of scholarship, has (among other things) challenged Nursing’s interpretation of Husserl and Heidegger (Paley, 1997; Paley, 1998), and suggested that caring theory might constitute a particularly egregious example of Nietzschean ‘slave morality’ (Paley, 2002). Most recently, he has characterized most of what nursing theory has had to say on the subject of spirituality as ‘unsupported statements’, ‘gratuitous claims’, ‘problematic’, and ‘unjustified’ (Paley, 2008a, p. 1, 2). He is fast becoming an Occam’s razor swinging figment of many a nursing theorist’s nightmares; if he keeps up the good work, he might even be labelled mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I hope I can join him, for I wholeheartedly agree with John that most ‘claims about higher powers, higher levels of existence, invisible forces, cosmic unity, the numinous, eternity, and other concepts of the supernatural’ (Paley, 2008a, p. 1) don’t belong in the literature of our discipline. However, the intervention Paley suggests, which consists mainly of a big dose of naturalism, is not precisely the one I would choose. By way of friendly amendment, then, I want to propose a slightly different treatment for the spirituality malady. My main concern is that Paley’s characterization of spirituality as a giant ‘conceptual sponge’ (Paley, 2008a) seems apt, but it is not the only giant conceptual sponge in intellectual life; naturalism is fast becoming another. David Papinau goes so far as to suggest that it ‘has no clear meaning in contemporary philosophy’ (Papineau, 2008, p. 1). William Seager echoes Papinau’s sentiments, writing that ‘Naturalism is supposed to be a Good Thing. So good, in fact, that everybody wants to be a naturalist, no matter what their views might be’ (Seager, 2000, p. 95). In contemporary analytic philosophy, at least, ‘non-naturalist’ borders on being a term of philosophical abuse; hardly anyone wants to be labelled a non-naturalist (although there are notable exceptions like Plantinga and Kripke). This has led, inevitably, to a situation in which no clear demarcation between the naturalist and the nonnaturalist can be drawn which commands wide assent. Some philosophical cases are fairly clear with regard to who counts as a naturalist. Drawing, by way of illustration, on the field of philosophy of mind (where, along with meta-ethics, most of the battles take place these days), pretty clearly any philosopher still subscribing to a straightforward dualism about mind would be a paradigm example of an ontological nonnaturalist, but these are in fairly short supply. David Chalmers comes closest,perhaps,but he labels his view about the mind ‘naturalistic dualism’ (Chalmers, 1997, p. 128), and this seems to confirm, about as well as anything can, Seager’s view that few indeed are the philosophers who want to be non-naturalists. At the other end of the spectrum, it seems equally uncontroversial that a genuine ‘eliminative materialist’ (broadly, one who holds the view that mental states like memory, belief and desire do not exist), would count as an ontological naturalist if anyone Correspondence: Robert W. Newsom III, Guilford Technical Community College, c/o 1008 Haywood Street, Greensboro, NC 27403, USA. Tel. : +1 336 324 5612; fax: +1 336 819 2039; e-mail: philprofbob@care2.com D ia lo gu e