| Summary: | In his Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime ([2015] 2017), French thinker Bruno Latour (1947–) provides a penetrating analysis of the philosophical implications of climate change and its associated uncertainties. This thesis philosophically clarifies and qualifies Latour’s thought—which I argue can be considered a major contribution to science-and-religion—and works through what climate change means for philosophy. In doing this, I make a methodological intervention on the sort of naturalism that guides both Latour’s work and a large part of the field of science-and-religion, and I develop a cultural philosophical approach that I call ‘transcendental naturalism’. I show the extent to which Latour’s occasionalist empiricist philosophy is comparable to and different from, on the one hand, the radical empiricist philosophy of William James (1842–1910), and, on the other hand, the transcendental empiricist philosophy of Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936). Both James and Rickert had developed philosophies that surpass the Cartesian dualisms of subject/object, mind/body, culture/nature, etc., and Latour’s philosophy turns out to be an unreflexive amalgam of a radical empiricist approach to experience (à la James) and a transcendental empiricist approach to values (à la Rickert). The transcendental naturalism that I propose offers a methodology for interpreting the relationships between science and religion, and it can be applied to reinterpret the interface between science and politics in the context of climate change, highlighting, for instance, issues such as the religious disenchantment of nature, the scientific disbelief in a plurality of value-laden perspectives, and the disregard for non-modern worldviews in politics. Part I establishes the philosophical framework by addressing the topics of wonder, judgement, values, and models. Part II further develops transcendental naturalism in the context of climate change by addressing the themes of poetics, authorities, and futures.
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