n.
In philosophy, the theory that affirms that all beings and events in the universe are natural and therefore can be fully known by the methods of scientific investigation.
Though naturalism has often been equated with materialism , it is much broader in scope. Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism , atheism and theism , idealism and materialism are all compatible with it. Naturalism was most influential in the 1930s and '40s, chiefly in the U.S. among philosophers such as F.J.E. Woodbridge (18671940), Morris R. Cohen (18801947), John Dewey , Ernest Nagel (190185), Sidney Hook (190289), and W.V.O. Quine .