John Shook is Vice President for Research and Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry Transnational in Amherst, N.Y. He received his PhD in philosophy at the University at Buffalo and was a professor of philosophy at Oklahoma State University for six years. His research and writing focuses on American philosophy, philosophy of science, epistemology, and political theory. His most recent book is the Blackwell Companion to Pragmatism, edited with Joseph Margolis. He authored Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, edited Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, and edited the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. He is also co-editor of the journals Contemporary Pragmatism and The Pluralist.

In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, John Shook discusses what Scientific Naturalism is, its history and its implications as well as its conflicts with Postmodernist, paranormal, and supernatural ideologies.