The Naturalism, Modernity, and Civilization International Research Network (NMCIRN) is jointly homed in the University of Padova’s Noumenon Research Group, SOAS University of London, and the Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy at the University of Potsdam. NMCIRN was co-founded in November 2021 by Antonio M. Nunziante and Paul Giladi. It is currently led by Antonio M. Nunziante, Luca Corti, and Paul Giladi. The network currently comprises over 40 academics from all over the world.

Central to the establishment of NMCIRN is recognition of some under-explored avenues of historical, philosophical, cultural, sociological, and political features of naturalism (loosely defined as ‘the view that the image of the world provided by the natural sciences as all there is to the world’). 

What motivates the research network specifically is making sense of the battles over naturalism in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s as a discourse about ‘civilization’. This particular conceptual framing is something NMCIRN thinks is symbolically and materially powerful. This is why we address the state of cultural play in the U.S. in the 1940s in conjunction with the contemporary intellectual struggle between defenders of scientific naturalism (as certain kinds of right-wing Sellarsians) and thinkers of various left-wing Sellarsian persuasions deeply hostile to the apparent ‘colonisation of the humanistic lifeworld’ by the exact sciences.

To best accomplish this ambitious discursive endeavour, NMCIRN seeks to produce and sustain an innovative, rich, cosmopolitan intellectual environment, one which pools resources from philosophy, cultural theory, history, sociology, and politics. NMCIRN, therefore, serves as an intellectual home for internationally and multi-disciplinary-oriented thinkers to collaboratively exchange ideas and to promote a reflection on the very future of the concept itself of civilization.