Contents contents introduction characteristics of naturalism influence of Naturalism on American literature Zola's work and naturalism 10 Ancient and medieval philosophy 16 Modern philosophy 18 conclusion 21 glossary 24 references 26

Etymology
The term «methodological naturalism» is much more recent, though. According to Ronald Numbers, it was coined in 1983 by Paul de Vries, a Wheaton College philosopher.
De Vries distinguished between what he called «methodological naturalism», a disciplinary method that says nothing about God's existence, and «metaphysical naturalism», which «denies the existence of a transcendent God». The term «methodological naturalism» had been used in 1937 by Edgar S.

CONCLUSION
In the United States, the genre is associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Ellen Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, Jack London, and most prominently Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. The term naturalism operates primarily in counter distinction to realism, particularly the mode of realism codified in the 1870s and 1880s, and associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James.
It is important to clarify the relationship between American literary naturalism, with which this entry is primarily concerned, from the genre also known as naturalism that flourished in France from the 1850s to the 1880s. French naturalism, as exemplified by Gustave Flaubert, and especially Emile Zola, can be regarded as a programmatic, well-defined and coherent theory of fiction that self-consciously rejected the notion of free will, and dedicated itself to the documentary and «scientific» exposition of human behavior as being determined by, as Zola put it, «nerves and blood.»
Many of the American naturalists, especially Norris and London, were heavily influenced by Zola. They sought explanations for human behavior in natural science, and were skeptical, at least, of organized religion and beliefs in human free will. However, the Americans did not form a coherent literary movement, and their occasional critical and theoretical reflections do not present a uniform philosophy. Although Zola was a touchstone of contemporary debates over genre, Dreiser, perhaps the most important of the naturalist writers, regarded Honore de Balzac, one of the founders of Realism, as a greater influence. Naturalism in American literature is therefore best understood historically in the generational manner outlined above. In philosophical and generic terms, American naturalism must be defined rather more loosely, as a reaction against the realist fiction of the 1870s and 1880s, whose scope was limited to middle-class or «local color» topics, with taboos on sexuality and violence.
Naturalist fiction often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. The naturalists were not the first to concentrate on the industrialized American city, but they were significant in that they believed that the realist tools refined in the 1870s and 1880s were inadequate to represent it. Abraham Cahan, for example, sought both to represent and to address the Jewish community of New York's East Side, of which he was a member. The fiction of Theodore Dreiser, the son of first and second generation immigrants from Central Europe, features many German and Irish figures. Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, themselves from established middle-class Anglophone families also registered the ethnic mix of the metropolis, though for the most part via reductive and offensive stereotypes. In somewhat different ways, more marginal to the mainstream of naturalism, Ellen Glasgow's version of realism was specifically directed against the mythologizing of the South, while the series of «problem novels» by David Graham Phillips, epitomized by the prostitution novel Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), can be regarded as naturalistic by virtue of their underclass subject-matter.
Naturalist fiction in the United States often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. Writers were skeptical towards, or downright hostile to, the notions of bourgeois individualism that characterized realist novels about middle-class life. Most naturalists demonstrated a concern with the animal or the irrational motivations for human behavior, sometimes manifested in connection with sexuality and violence.
In America naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Charles Darwin. Darwinism seemed to stress the animality of man, to suggest that he was dominated by the irresistible forces of evolution (Wu Weiren, 1990, p.8) The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such writers as Frank Norris, jack London, Theodore Dreiser and Hemingway. Their detailed descriptions of the lives of the down-trodden and the abnormal, their frank treatment of human passion and sexuality and their portrayal of men and women overwhelmed by the blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writer.
The literary naturalism movement had a tremendous effect on twentieth-century literature. Donald Prizer, author of Twentieth-Century Literary Naturalism, conducted an analysis to see exactly what attributes tied the different naturalistic texts together and gave them their naturalistic identity. He used John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and James T. Farrell's works in his experiment. Ultimately, Prizer concluded that the naturalistic tradition that glued these authors and their works together was the concept of the struggle between fiercely deterministic forces in the world and the individual's desire to exert freedom in the world. In other words, a reflection on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's quote, «Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,» is what Donald Prizer is striving for. He states, «The naturalistic novelist is willing to concede that there are fundamental limitations to man's freedom, but he is unwilling to concede that man is thereby stripped of all value.» Based on this, Prizer came up with three recurring themes in naturalistic writing: 1) the tragic waste of human potential due to vile circumstances, 2) order (or the lack of), and 3) the individual's struggle to understand the forces affecting one's life. In fact, the impact that the naturalism movement had on American writers of the twentieth century was colossal. It led to the evolution of the modernism movement, during the dreadfully real times of World War I and World War II, and made one realize that life was truly a struggle to embrace the forces of nature that toyed with the individual.