Materialism
Encyclopedia
In philosophy
, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists
is matter
; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness
) are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance
. To many philosophers, not only is 'physicalism
' synonymous with 'materialism', but they use both words to describe a position that supports ideas from physics which may not be matter in the traditional sense (like anti-matter or gravity). Therefore much of the generally philosophical discussion below on materialism may be relevant to physicalism. Also related are the ideas of methodological naturalism (i.e. "let's at least do science as though physicalism is true") and metaphysical naturalism
(i.e. "philosophy and science should operate according to the physical world, and that's all that exists"). The philosophical alternatives to materialism are some forms of monism
(besides the materialistic monism), dualism
and idealism
.
ontology
. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism
or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism would be in contrast to idealism
, neutral monism
and spiritualism
.
Despite the large number of philosophical schools and subtle nuances between many, all philosophies are said to fall into one of two primary categories, which are defined in contrast to each other: Idealism, and materialism. The basic proposition of these two categories pertains to the nature of reality, and the primary distinction between them is the way they answer two fundamental questions: "what does reality consist of and how does it originate?" To idealists, spirit or mind is primary, and created matter secondary. To materialists, matter is primary and mind or spirit is secondary, a product of matter acting upon matter.
The materialist view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, famously by René Descartes
. However, by itself materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice, it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism
or another.
Materialism is often associated with reductionism
, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description — typically, at a more reduced level. Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, however, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties, or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor
influentially argues this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics. A lot of vigorous literature has grown up around the relation between these views.
Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of other scientifically observable entities such as energy
, force
s, and the curvature of space. However philosophers such as Mary Midgley
suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined.
Materialism typically contrasts with dualism
, phenomenalism
, idealism
, vitalism
and dual-aspect monism. Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked to the concept of Determinism
, as espoused by Enlightenment
thinkers. It has been criticized as a spiritually
empty philosophy.
During the 19th century, Karl Marx
, influenced by Hegel and early positivists, extended the concept of materialism to elaborate a materialist conception of history, which goes beyond metaphysics
to apply to sociology
and political economy
, centered on the roughly empirical world of human activity (practice, including labor) and the institution
s created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history
). In psychology
, a similar view is called Behaviorism
.
during what Karl Jaspers
termed the Axial Age
(approximately 800 to 200 BC).
In Ancient Indian
philosophy
, materialism developed around 600 BC with the works of Ajita Kesakambali
, Payasi
, Kanada
, and the proponents of the Cārvāka
school of philosophy. Kanada became one of the early proponents of atomism
. The Nyaya
–Vaisesika school (600 BC - 100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism, though their proofs of God and their positing that the consciousness was not material precludes labelling them as materialists. The atomic tradition was carried forward by Buddhist atomism
and the Jaina
school.
Xun Zi
(ca. 312–230 BC) developed a Confucian doctrine oriented on realism and materialism in Ancient China. Other notable Chinese materialists of this time include Yang Xiong and Wang Chong
.
Ancient Greek philosophers
like Anaxagoras
(ca. 500 BC – 428 BC), Epicurus
and Democritus
prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
(ca. 99 BC – ca. 55 BC) recounts the mechanistic
philosophy of Democritus
and Epicurus
. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena result from different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called "atoms" (literally: "indivisibles"). De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations for phenomena such as erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound. Famous principles like "nothing can come from nothing" and "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in the works of Lucretius.
philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400 AD.
In early 12th-century al-Andalus
, the Arabian philosopher
, Ibn Tufail
(Abubacer), wrote discussions on materialism in his philosophical novel
, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
(Philosophus Autodidactus), while vaguely foreshadowing the idea of a historical materialism
.
represented the materialist tradition, in opposition to René Descartes
' attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist
foundations. There followed the materialist and atheist
Jean Meslier
, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d'Holbach
, Denis Diderot
and other French Enlightenment thinkers; as well as in England, the pedestrian traveller John "Walking" Stewart, whose insistence that all matter is endowed with a moral
dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth
.
Schopenhauer wrote that "...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself". He claimed that an observing subject can only know material objects through the mediation of the brain and its particular organization. The way that the brain knows determines the way that material objects are experienced. "Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time."
The materialist and atheist Ludwig Feuerbach would a signal a new turn in materialism through his book, The Essence of Christianity
, which gave a Hegelian
account of how religion and God are nothing else but an outward projection of man's inward material nature. Feuerbach's materialism would later influence Karl Marx
.
, there emerged a new philosophical
and political
theory called Marxism
. Its founder, Karl Marx, interpreted the world and its laws by highlighting the materialistic aspects of life as vehicles of world history, and that is why his theory is called materialism.
Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels
, turning Hegel's idealist
dialectic
s upside down, came up with two distinct concepts: dialectical materialism
and a materialist account of the course of history known as the materialist conception of history, later labeled historical materialism
. Marx regarded the base material of the world as productive forces
and their corresponding social relations (mainly class relations, e.g. between serfs and their lord, or between employees and their employer). As an expression of these basic social relations, all other ideologies form, including those of science, economics, law, morality, etc. Historical materialism
has been expanded upon in the 20th century.
Marx and Engels used the term "materialism" to refer to a theoretical perspective that holds the satisfaction of everyday economic needs is the primary reality in every epoch of history. Opposed to German idealist philosophy, materialism takes the position that society and reality originate from a set of simple economic acts which human beings carry out in order to provide the material necessities of food, shelter, and clothing. Materialism takes as its starting point that before anything else, human beings must produce their everyday economic needs through their physical labor and practical productive activity. This single economic act, Marx believed, gives rise to a system of social relations which include political, legal and religious models usually intended to facilitate this process or justify the current social system in existence.
Scientific socialism
holds that social mores, values, cultural traits and economic practices are not the property of some immutable natural law (as in idealism), but are products of the social environment and are thus relative to the specific form of social organization in existence. These social relations are determined by material forces in society, such as the productive forces, natural environment and the level of technology.
, Willard Van Orman Quine
, Donald Davidson
, John Rogers Searle, and Jerry Fodor
—operate within a broadly physicalist or materialist framework, producing rival accounts of how best to accommodate mind
—functionalism
, anomalous monism
, identity theory and so on.
Scientific 'Materialism' is often synonymous with, and has so far been described, as being a reductive materialism. In recent years, Paul
and Patricia Churchland
have advocated a radically contrasting position (at least, in regards to certain hypotheses); eliminativist materialism holds that some mental phenomena simply do not exist at all, and that talk of those mental phenomena reflects a totally spurious "folk psychology
" and Introspection illusion
. That is, an eliminative materialist might suggest that a concept like 'belief' simply has no basis in fact - the way folk science speaks of demon-caused illnesses. Reductive materialism being at one end of a continuum (our theories will reduce to facts) and eliminative materialism on the other (certain theories will need to be eliminated in light of new facts), Revisionary materialism
is somewhere in the middle.
), or multiple kinds? Is matter a continuous substance capable of expressing multiple forms (hylomorphism), or a number of discrete, unchanging constituents (atomism
)? Does it have intrinsic properties (substance theory
), or is it lacking them (prima materia)?
One challenge to the traditional concept of matter as tangible "stuff" came with the rise of field physics in the 19th century. However the conclusion that materialism is false may be premature. Relativity
shows that matter and energy (including the spatially distributed energy of fields) are interchangeable. This enables the ontological view that energy is prima materia and matter is one of its forms. On the other hand, the Standard Model of Particle physics uses quantum field theory
to describe all interactions. On this view it could be said that fields are prima materia and the energy is a property of the field.
According to the dominant cosmological model, the Lambda-CDM model
, less than 5% of the universes energy density is made up of the "matter" described by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and the majority of the universe is composed of Dark Matter
and Dark Energy
- with no agreement amongst scientists about what these are made of.
This obviously refutes the traditional materialism that held that the only things that exist are things composed of the kind of matter with which we are broadly familiar ("traditional matter") - which was anyway under great strain as noted above from relativity
and quantum field theory
. But if the definition of "matter" is extended to "anything whose existence can be inferred from the observed behaviour of traditional matter" then there is no reason in principle why entities whose existence materialists normally deny should not be considered as "matter".
While it is believed by many physical scientists that the concept of matter has merely changed, rather than being eliminated, some have taken a more extreme position. For instance Werner Heisenberg
once said “The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible . .. atoms are not things.”. Likewise, some philosophers feel that these dichotomies necessitate a switch from materialism to physicalism
. Others use the terms "materialism" and "physicalism" interchangeably.
criticises it, and the Emiritus Regius Professor of Divinity Keith Ward
suggests that materialism is rare amongst contemporary UK philosophers: "Looking around my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists."
and John Gribbin
have openly expressed how scientific finds in physics such as quantum mechanics
and chaos theory
have disproven materialism. In their 1991 book The Matter Myth in the first chapter titled The death of materialism they wrote:
, Judaism
and Islam
. In most of Hinduism
and Transcendentalism
, all matter is believed to be an illusion called Maya
, blinding us from knowing the truth. Maya is the limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. Maya gets destroyed for a person when they perceive Brahman
with transcendental knowledge.
Kant
argued against all three forms of materialism, subjective idealism (which he contrasts with his "transcendental idealism") and dualism. However, Kant also argues that change and time require an enduring substrate, and does so in connection with his Refutation of Idealism Postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers also express a skepticism about any all-encompassing metaphysical scheme. Philosopher Mary Midgley
, among others, argues that materialism is a self-refuting idea
, at least in its eliminative form.
said we "know not what" the basic substance is. As Berkeley
wrote "I acknowledge it is possible we might perceive all things just as we do now, though there was no Matter in the world; neither can I conceive, if there be Matter, how it should produce any idea in our minds". If mind-independent properties (properly speaking property-instances or tropes
) are held to exist in association with each other but without a material substrate, bundle theory
results. If bundle theory is shown to be illogical or inconceivable, the existence of a substrate is thereby demonstrated conceptually, despite the imperceivability of matter per se.
, such as those of Hegel and Berkeley
is ipso facto an argument against materialism. Matter can be argued to be redundant, as in bundle theory, and mind-independent properties can in turn be reduced to subjective percepts.
results. This actually has much broader implications.
, holism
and process philosophy
seek to ameliorate the perceived shortcomings of traditional (especially mechanistic
) materialism without abandoning materialism entirely.
approach to theorizing, rather than to the ontological claim that matter is the only substance.
Particle physicist
and Anglican theologian
John Polkinghorne
objects to what he calls promissory materialism — claims that materialistic science will eventually succeed in explaining phenomena it has not so far been able to explain. (Polkinghorne prefers dual-aspect monism to materialism.)
The psychologist Imants Barušs
suggests that "materialists tend to indiscriminately apply a 'pebbles in a box' schema to explanations of reality even though such a schema is known to be incorrect in general for physical phenomena. Thus, materialism cannot explain matter, let alone anomalous phenomena or subjective experience, but remains entrenched in academia largely for political reasons." (Compare with Charles Fort
.)
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists
Existence
In common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...
is matter
Matter
Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
) are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance
Substance theory
Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears....
. To many philosophers, not only is 'physicalism
Physicalism
Physicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things...
' synonymous with 'materialism', but they use both words to describe a position that supports ideas from physics which may not be matter in the traditional sense (like anti-matter or gravity). Therefore much of the generally philosophical discussion below on materialism may be relevant to physicalism. Also related are the ideas of methodological naturalism (i.e. "let's at least do science as though physicalism is true") and metaphysical naturalism
Metaphysical naturalism
Metaphysical naturalism, also called ontological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, or just naturalism, is a philosophical worldview and belief system that holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences, i.e., those...
(i.e. "philosophy and science should operate according to the physical world, and that's all that exists"). The philosophical alternatives to materialism are some forms of monism
Monism
Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry. Accordingly, some philosophers may hold that the universe is one rather than dualistic or pluralistic...
(besides the materialistic monism), dualism
Dualism
Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
and idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
.
Overview
Materialism belongs to the class of monistMonism
Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry. Accordingly, some philosophers may hold that the universe is one rather than dualistic or pluralistic...
ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism
Dualism
Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism would be in contrast to idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
, neutral monism
Neutral monism
Neutral monism, in philosophy, is the metaphysical view that the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves "neutral," that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally...
and spiritualism
Spiritualism
Spiritualism is a belief system or religion, postulating the belief that spirits of the dead residing in the spirit world have both the ability and the inclination to communicate with the living...
.
Despite the large number of philosophical schools and subtle nuances between many, all philosophies are said to fall into one of two primary categories, which are defined in contrast to each other: Idealism, and materialism. The basic proposition of these two categories pertains to the nature of reality, and the primary distinction between them is the way they answer two fundamental questions: "what does reality consist of and how does it originate?" To idealists, spirit or mind is primary, and created matter secondary. To materialists, matter is primary and mind or spirit is secondary, a product of matter acting upon matter.
The materialist view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, famously by René Descartes
René Descartes
René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
. However, by itself materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice, it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism
Physicalism
Physicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things...
or another.
Materialism is often associated with reductionism
Reduction (philosophy)
In philosophy, reduction is the process by which one object, property, concept, theory, etc., is shown to be explicable in terms of another, lower level, entity...
, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description — typically, at a more reduced level. Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, however, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties, or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
influentially argues this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics. A lot of vigorous literature has grown up around the relation between these views.
Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of other scientifically observable entities such as energy
Energy
In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...
, force
Force
In physics, a force is any influence that causes an object to undergo a change in speed, a change in direction, or a change in shape. In other words, a force is that which can cause an object with mass to change its velocity , i.e., to accelerate, or which can cause a flexible object to deform...
s, and the curvature of space. However philosophers such as Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley, née Scrutton , is an English moral philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and is known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature , when she was in her fifties...
suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined.
Materialism typically contrasts with dualism
Dualism (philosophy of mind)
In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical....
, phenomenalism
Phenomenalism
Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects do not exist as things in themselves but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli situated in time and in space...
, idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
, vitalism
Vitalism
Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is#a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions...
and dual-aspect monism. Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked to the concept of Determinism
Determinism
Determinism is the general philosophical thesis that states that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen. There are many versions of this thesis. Each of them rests upon various alleged connections, and interdependencies of things and...
, as espoused by Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
thinkers. It has been criticized as a spiritually
Spirituality
Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...
empty philosophy.
During the 19th century, Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, influenced by Hegel and early positivists, extended the concept of materialism to elaborate a materialist conception of history, which goes beyond metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
to apply to sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
and political economy
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
, centered on the roughly empirical world of human activity (practice, including labor) and the institution
Institution
An institution is any structure or mechanism of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human community...
s created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history
Historical materialism
Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
). In psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, a similar view is called Behaviorism
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
.
Axial Age
Materialism developed, possibly independently, in several geographically separated regions of EurasiaEurasia
Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
during what Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system...
termed the Axial Age
Axial Age
German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term the axial age or axial period to describe the period from 800 to 200 BC, during which, according to Jaspers, similar revolutionary thinking appeared in India, China and the Occident...
(approximately 800 to 200 BC).
In Ancient Indian
History of India
The history of India begins with evidence of human activity of Homo sapiens as long as 75,000 years ago, or with earlier hominids including Homo erectus from about 500,000 years ago. The Indus Valley Civilization, which spread and flourished in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent from...
philosophy
Indian philosophy
India has a rich and diverse philosophical tradition dating back to ancient times. According to Radhakrishnan, the earlier Upanisads constitute "...the earliest philosophical compositions of the world."...
, materialism developed around 600 BC with the works of Ajita Kesakambali
Ajita Kesakambali
Ajita Kesakambali was an ancient Indian philosopher in the 6th century BC. He is considered to be the first known proponent of Indian materialism. He was probably a contemporary of Buddha and Mahavira. It has frequently been noted that the doctrines of the Lokayata school were considerably drawn...
, Payasi
Payasi
Payasi was a materialist philosopher in ancient India and was possibly a contemporary of Buddha. He was possibly a prince, if early Buddhist and Jaina sources could be believed....
, Kanada
Kanada
It has been claimed that Kashyapa, later known as Kanada was a Hindu sage and philosopher who founded the philosophical school of Vaisheshika. He talked of Dvyanuka and tryanuka...
, and the proponents of the Cārvāka
Carvaka
' , also known as ', is a system of Indian philosophy that assumes various forms of philosophical skepticism and religious indifference. It seems named after , the probable author of the and probably a follower of Brihaspati, who founded the ' philosophy.In overviews of Indian philosophy, Cārvāka...
school of philosophy. Kanada became one of the early proponents of atomism
Atomism
Atomism is a natural philosophy that developed in several ancient traditions. The atomists theorized that the natural world consists of two fundamental parts: indivisible atoms and empty void.According to Aristotle, atoms are indestructible and immutable and there are an infinite variety of shapes...
. The Nyaya
Nyaya
' is the name given to one of the six orthodox or astika schools of Hindu philosophy—specifically the school of logic...
–Vaisesika school (600 BC - 100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism, though their proofs of God and their positing that the consciousness was not material precludes labelling them as materialists. The atomic tradition was carried forward by Buddhist atomism
Buddhist atomism
Buddhist atomism is a school of atomistic Buddhist philosophy that flourished on the Indian subcontinent during two major periods . During the first phase, which began to develop prior to the 4th century BCE, Buddhist atomism had a very qualitative, Aristotelian-style atomic theory. This form of...
and the Jaina
Jainism
Jainism is an Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings. Its philosophy and practice emphasize the necessity of self-effort to move the soul towards divine consciousness and liberation. Any soul that has conquered its own inner enemies and achieved the state...
school.
Xun Zi
Xun Zi
Xun Zi was a Chinese Confucian philosopher who lived during the Warring States Period and contributed to one of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Xun Zi believed man's inborn tendencies need to be curbed through education and ritual, counter to Mencius's view that man is innately good...
(ca. 312–230 BC) developed a Confucian doctrine oriented on realism and materialism in Ancient China. Other notable Chinese materialists of this time include Yang Xiong and Wang Chong
Wang Chong
Wang Chong , courtesy name Zhongren , was a Chinese philosopher active during the Han Dynasty. He developed a rational, secular, naturalistic and mechanistic account of the world and of human beings and gave a materialistic explanation of the origin of the universe. His main work was the Lùnhéng...
.
Ancient Greek philosophers
Greek philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BCE and continued through the Hellenistic period, at which point Ancient Greece was incorporated in the Roman Empire...
like Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a fiery mass larger than...
(ca. 500 BC – 428 BC), Epicurus
Epicurus
Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works...
and Democritus
Democritus
Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos....
prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
Lucretius
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...
(ca. 99 BC – ca. 55 BC) recounts the mechanistic
Mechanism (philosophy)
Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes are like machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other, and with their order imposed from without. Thus, the source of an apparent thing's activities is not the whole itself, but its parts or an external...
philosophy of Democritus
Democritus
Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos....
and Epicurus
Epicurus
Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works...
. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena result from different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called "atoms" (literally: "indivisibles"). De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations for phenomena such as erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound. Famous principles like "nothing can come from nothing" and "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in the works of Lucretius.
Common Era
Later Indian materialist Jayaraashi Bhatta (6th century CE) in his work Tattvopaplavasimha ("The upsetting of all principles") refuted the Nyaya Sutra epistemology. The materialistic CārvākaCarvaka
' , also known as ', is a system of Indian philosophy that assumes various forms of philosophical skepticism and religious indifference. It seems named after , the probable author of the and probably a follower of Brihaspati, who founded the ' philosophy.In overviews of Indian philosophy, Cārvāka...
philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400 AD.
In early 12th-century al-Andalus
Al-Andalus
Al-Andalus was the Arabic name given to a nation and territorial region also commonly referred to as Moorish Iberia. The name describes parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania governed by Muslims , at various times in the period between 711 and 1492, although the territorial boundaries...
, the Arabian philosopher
Early Islamic philosophy
Early Islamic philosophy or classical Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar and lasting until the 6th century AH...
, Ibn Tufail
Ibn Tufail
Ibn Tufail was an Andalusian Muslim polymath: an Arabic writer, novelist, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, vizier,...
(Abubacer), wrote discussions on materialism in his philosophical novel
Philosophical novel
Philosophical fiction refers to works of fiction in which a significant proportion of the work is devoted to a discussion of the sort of questions normally addressed in discursive philosophy. These might include the function and role of society, the purpose of life, ethics or morals, the role of...
, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān is an Arabic philosophical novel and allegorical tale written by Ibn Tufail in the early 12th century.- Translations :* from Wikisource* English translations of Hayy bin Yaqzan...
(Philosophus Autodidactus), while vaguely foreshadowing the idea of a historical materialism
Historical materialism
Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
.
Modern Era
Later on, Pierre GassendiPierre Gassendi
Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, priest, scientist, astronomer, and mathematician. With a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the...
represented the materialist tradition, in opposition to René Descartes
René Descartes
René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
' attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist
Dualism
Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
foundations. There followed the materialist and atheist
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
Jean Meslier
Jean Meslier
Jean Meslier was a French Catholic priest who was discovered, upon his death, to have written a book-length philosophical essay promoting atheism. Described by the author as his "testament" to his parishioners, the text denounces all religion.-Life:Jean Meslier was born in Mazerny in the Ardennes...
, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d'Holbach
Baron d'Holbach
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon...
, Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
and other French Enlightenment thinkers; as well as in England, the pedestrian traveller John "Walking" Stewart, whose insistence that all matter is endowed with a moral
Moral
A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim...
dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
.
Schopenhauer wrote that "...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself". He claimed that an observing subject can only know material objects through the mediation of the brain and its particular organization. The way that the brain knows determines the way that material objects are experienced. "Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time."
The materialist and atheist Ludwig Feuerbach would a signal a new turn in materialism through his book, The Essence of Christianity
The Essence of Christianity
The Essence of Christianity is a book written by Ludwig Feuerbach and first published in 1841. It explains Feuerbach's philosophy and critique of religion. Feuerbach's theory of alienation would later be used by Karl Marx.- Influence :...
, which gave a Hegelian
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
account of how religion and God are nothing else but an outward projection of man's inward material nature. Feuerbach's materialism would later influence Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
.
Materialist conception of history and Marx
In 1870s EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, there emerged a new philosophical
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
and political
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
theory called Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
. Its founder, Karl Marx, interpreted the world and its laws by highlighting the materialistic aspects of life as vehicles of world history, and that is why his theory is called materialism.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
, turning Hegel's idealist
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
s upside down, came up with two distinct concepts: dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
and a materialist account of the course of history known as the materialist conception of history, later labeled historical materialism
Historical materialism
Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
. Marx regarded the base material of the world as productive forces
Productive forces
Productive forces, "productive powers" or "forces of production" [in German, Produktivkräfte] is a central idea in Marxism and historical materialism....
and their corresponding social relations (mainly class relations, e.g. between serfs and their lord, or between employees and their employer). As an expression of these basic social relations, all other ideologies form, including those of science, economics, law, morality, etc. Historical materialism
Historical materialism
Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
has been expanded upon in the 20th century.
Marx and Engels used the term "materialism" to refer to a theoretical perspective that holds the satisfaction of everyday economic needs is the primary reality in every epoch of history. Opposed to German idealist philosophy, materialism takes the position that society and reality originate from a set of simple economic acts which human beings carry out in order to provide the material necessities of food, shelter, and clothing. Materialism takes as its starting point that before anything else, human beings must produce their everyday economic needs through their physical labor and practical productive activity. This single economic act, Marx believed, gives rise to a system of social relations which include political, legal and religious models usually intended to facilitate this process or justify the current social system in existence.
Scientific socialism
Scientific Socialism
Scientific socialism is the term used by Friedrich Engels to describe the social-political-economic theory first pioneered by Karl Marx. The purported reason why this socialism is "scientific socialism" is because its theories are held to an empirical standard, observations are essential to its...
holds that social mores, values, cultural traits and economic practices are not the property of some immutable natural law (as in idealism), but are products of the social environment and are thus relative to the specific form of social organization in existence. These social relations are determined by material forces in society, such as the productive forces, natural environment and the level of technology.
Scientific materialists
Many current and recent philosophers—e.g., Daniel DennettDaniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
, Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...
, Donald Davidson
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher born in Springfield, Massachusetts, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton...
, John Rogers Searle, and Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
—operate within a broadly physicalist or materialist framework, producing rival accounts of how best to accommodate mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
—functionalism
Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, they are causal relations to other mental...
, anomalous monism
Anomalous monism
Anomalous monism is a philosophical thesis about the mind-body relationship. It was first proposed by Donald Davidson in his 1970 paper Mental events. The theory is twofold and states that mental events are identical with physical events, and that the mental is anomalous, i.e. under their mental...
, identity theory and so on.
Scientific 'Materialism' is often synonymous with, and has so far been described, as being a reductive materialism. In recent years, Paul
Paul Churchland
Paul Churchland is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy. Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and...
and Patricia Churchland
Patricia Churchland
Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She has been a Professor at the University of California, San Diego since 1984...
have advocated a radically contrasting position (at least, in regards to certain hypotheses); eliminativist materialism holds that some mental phenomena simply do not exist at all, and that talk of those mental phenomena reflects a totally spurious "folk psychology
Folk psychology
Folk psychology is the set of assumptions, constructs, and convictions that makes up the everyday language in which people discuss human psychology...
" and Introspection illusion
Introspection illusion
The introspection illusion is a cognitive illusion in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable...
. That is, an eliminative materialist might suggest that a concept like 'belief' simply has no basis in fact - the way folk science speaks of demon-caused illnesses. Reductive materialism being at one end of a continuum (our theories will reduce to facts) and eliminative materialism on the other (certain theories will need to be eliminated in light of new facts), Revisionary materialism
Revisionary materialism
Revisionary materialism is the view that falls between Eliminative materialism and Reductive materialism when it comes to a particular psychological phenomenon....
is somewhere in the middle.
Defining matter
The nature and definition of matter - like other key concepts in science and philosophy - have occasioned much debate. Is there a single kind of matter which everything is made of (hyleHyle
In philosophy, hyle refers to matter or stuff. It can also be the material cause underlying a change in Aristotelian philosophy. The Greeks originally had no word for matter in general, as opposed to raw material suitable for some specific purpose or other, so Aristotle adapted the word for...
), or multiple kinds? Is matter a continuous substance capable of expressing multiple forms (hylomorphism), or a number of discrete, unchanging constituents (atomism
Atomism
Atomism is a natural philosophy that developed in several ancient traditions. The atomists theorized that the natural world consists of two fundamental parts: indivisible atoms and empty void.According to Aristotle, atoms are indestructible and immutable and there are an infinite variety of shapes...
)? Does it have intrinsic properties (substance theory
Substance theory
Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears....
), or is it lacking them (prima materia)?
One challenge to the traditional concept of matter as tangible "stuff" came with the rise of field physics in the 19th century. However the conclusion that materialism is false may be premature. Relativity
Special relativity
Special relativity is the physical theory of measurement in an inertial frame of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".It generalizes Galileo's...
shows that matter and energy (including the spatially distributed energy of fields) are interchangeable. This enables the ontological view that energy is prima materia and matter is one of its forms. On the other hand, the Standard Model of Particle physics uses quantum field theory
Quantum field theory
Quantum field theory provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parametrized by an infinite number of dynamical degrees of freedom, that is, fields and many-body systems. It is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics and...
to describe all interactions. On this view it could be said that fields are prima materia and the energy is a property of the field.
According to the dominant cosmological model, the Lambda-CDM model
Lambda-CDM model
ΛCDM or Lambda-CDM is an abbreviation for Lambda-Cold Dark Matter, which is also known as the cold dark matter model with dark energy...
, less than 5% of the universes energy density is made up of the "matter" described by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and the majority of the universe is composed of Dark Matter
Dark matter
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is matter that neither emits nor scatters light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so cannot be directly detected via optical or radio astronomy...
and Dark Energy
Dark energy
In physical cosmology, astronomy and celestial mechanics, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the most accepted theory to explain recent observations that the universe appears to be expanding...
- with no agreement amongst scientists about what these are made of.
This obviously refutes the traditional materialism that held that the only things that exist are things composed of the kind of matter with which we are broadly familiar ("traditional matter") - which was anyway under great strain as noted above from relativity
Special relativity
Special relativity is the physical theory of measurement in an inertial frame of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".It generalizes Galileo's...
and quantum field theory
Quantum field theory
Quantum field theory provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parametrized by an infinite number of dynamical degrees of freedom, that is, fields and many-body systems. It is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics and...
. But if the definition of "matter" is extended to "anything whose existence can be inferred from the observed behaviour of traditional matter" then there is no reason in principle why entities whose existence materialists normally deny should not be considered as "matter".
While it is believed by many physical scientists that the concept of matter has merely changed, rather than being eliminated, some have taken a more extreme position. For instance Werner Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory...
once said “The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible . .. atoms are not things.”. Likewise, some philosophers feel that these dichotomies necessitate a switch from materialism to physicalism
Physicalism
Physicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things...
. Others use the terms "materialism" and "physicalism" interchangeably.
Criticism and alternatives
The professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Alvin PlantingaAlvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher and the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and Christian apologetics...
criticises it, and the Emiritus Regius Professor of Divinity Keith Ward
Keith Ward
Keith Ward is a British cleric, philosopher, theologian and scholar. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an ordained priest of the Church of England. He was a canon of Christ Church, Oxford until 2003...
suggests that materialism is rare amongst contemporary UK philosophers: "Looking around my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists."
Scientific rejection of materialism
Some modern day physicists and science writers such as Paul DaviesPaul Davies
Paul Charles William Davies, AM is an English physicist, writer and broadcaster, currently a professor at Arizona State University as well as the Director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science...
and John Gribbin
John Gribbin
John R. Gribbin is a British science writer and a visiting Fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex.- Biography :John Gribbin graduated with his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Sussex in 1966. Gribbin then earned his master of science degree in astronomy in 1967, also...
have openly expressed how scientific finds in physics such as quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic...
and chaos theory
Chaos theory
Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the...
have disproven materialism. In their 1991 book The Matter Myth in the first chapter titled The death of materialism they wrote:
Religious and spiritual objections
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, materialism denies the existence of both deities and "souls." It is therefore incompatible with most world religions including ChristianityChristianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
and Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
. In most of Hinduism
Hinduism
Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian Subcontinent. Hinduism is known to its followers as , amongst many other expressions...
and Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian...
, all matter is believed to be an illusion called Maya
Maya (illusion)
Maya , in Indian religions, has multiple meanings, usually quoted as "illusion", centered on the fact that we do not experience the environment itself but rather a projection of it, created by us. Maya is the principal deity that manifests, perpetuates and governs the illusion and dream of duality...
, blinding us from knowing the truth. Maya is the limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. Maya gets destroyed for a person when they perceive Brahman
Brahman
In Hinduism, Brahman is the one supreme, universal Spirit that is the origin and support of the phenomenal universe. Brahman is sometimes referred to as the Absolute or Godhead which is the Divine Ground of all being...
with transcendental knowledge.
Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
argued against all three forms of materialism, subjective idealism (which he contrasts with his "transcendental idealism") and dualism. However, Kant also argues that change and time require an enduring substrate, and does so in connection with his Refutation of Idealism Postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers also express a skepticism about any all-encompassing metaphysical scheme. Philosopher Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley, née Scrutton , is an English moral philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and is known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature , when she was in her fifties...
, among others, argues that materialism is a self-refuting idea
Self-refuting idea
Self-refuting ideas are ideas or statements whose falsehood is a logical consequence of the act or situation of holding them to be true. Many ideas are accused by their detractors of being self-refuting, and such accusations are therefore almost always controversial, with defenders claiming that...
, at least in its eliminative form.
Bundle Theory
It can be argued that it is the properties of material bodies, such as size and shape, which are perceived, and not the material substrate itself. LockeJohn Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
said we "know not what" the basic substance is. As Berkeley
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
wrote "I acknowledge it is possible we might perceive all things just as we do now, though there was no Matter in the world; neither can I conceive, if there be Matter, how it should produce any idea in our minds". If mind-independent properties (properly speaking property-instances or tropes
Trope (philosophy)
The term "trope" is both a term which denotes figurative and metaphorical language and one which has been used in various technical senses. The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος , "a turn, a change", related to the root of the verb τρέπειν , "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change"; this...
) are held to exist in association with each other but without a material substrate, bundle theory
Bundle theory
Bundle theory, originated by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, is the ontological theory about objecthood in which an object consists only of a collection of properties, relations or tropes....
results. If bundle theory is shown to be illogical or inconceivable, the existence of a substrate is thereby demonstrated conceptually, despite the imperceivability of matter per se.
Idealism
An argument for idealismIdealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
, such as those of Hegel and Berkeley
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
is ipso facto an argument against materialism. Matter can be argued to be redundant, as in bundle theory, and mind-independent properties can in turn be reduced to subjective percepts.
Dualism
If matter is seen as necessary to explain the physical world, but incapable of explaining mind, dualismDualism (philosophy of mind)
In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical....
results. This actually has much broader implications.
Other approaches
EmergenceEmergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....
, holism
Holism
Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone...
and process philosophy
Process philosophy
Process philosophy identifies metaphysical reality with change and dynamism. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have posited true reality as "timeless", based on permanent substances, whilst processes are denied or subordinated to timeless substances...
seek to ameliorate the perceived shortcomings of traditional (especially mechanistic
Mechanism (philosophy)
Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes are like machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other, and with their order imposed from without. Thus, the source of an apparent thing's activities is not the whole itself, but its parts or an external...
) materialism without abandoning materialism entirely.
Materialism as methodology
Some critics object to materialism as part of an overly skeptical, narrow or reductivistReductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...
approach to theorizing, rather than to the ontological claim that matter is the only substance.
Particle physicist
Particle physics
Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the existence and interactions of particles that are the constituents of what is usually referred to as matter or radiation. In current understanding, particles are excitations of quantum fields and interact following their dynamics...
and Anglican theologian
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
John Polkinghorne
John Polkinghorne
John Charlton Polkinghorne KBE FRS is an English theoretical physicist, theologian, writer, and Anglican priest. He was professor of Mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest...
objects to what he calls promissory materialism — claims that materialistic science will eventually succeed in explaining phenomena it has not so far been able to explain. (Polkinghorne prefers dual-aspect monism to materialism.)
The psychologist Imants Barušs
Imants Barušs
Imants Barušs is Professor of Psychology at King's University College at The University of Western Ontario, Canada.-Background:He started out in engineering science on a scholarship at the University of Toronto, but then became preoccupied with existential questions, leading him into unconventional...
suggests that "materialists tend to indiscriminately apply a 'pebbles in a box' schema to explanations of reality even though such a schema is known to be incorrect in general for physical phenomena. Thus, materialism cannot explain matter, let alone anomalous phenomena or subjective experience, but remains entrenched in academia largely for political reasons." (Compare with Charles Fort
Charles Fort
Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort's books sold well and are still in print today.-Biography:Charles Hoy Fort was born in 1874 in Albany, New York, of Dutch...
.)
See also
- Antimaterialism
- AtheismAtheismAtheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
- BuddhismBuddhismBuddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
- CārvākaCarvaka' , also known as ', is a system of Indian philosophy that assumes various forms of philosophical skepticism and religious indifference. It seems named after , the probable author of the and probably a follower of Brihaspati, who founded the ' philosophy.In overviews of Indian philosophy, Cārvāka...
- JainismJainismJainism is an Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings. Its philosophy and practice emphasize the necessity of self-effort to move the soul towards divine consciousness and liberation. Any soul that has conquered its own inner enemies and achieved the state...
- Christian materialismChristian materialismChristian materialism is the combination of Christian theology with the ideas of materialism, which places a high value on material things.-Historical background:...
- Cultural materialismCultural materialismThe term Cultural materialism refers to two separate scholarly endeavours:* Cultural materialism — an anthropological research paradigm championed most notably by Marvin Harris....
- Dialectical materialismDialectical materialismDialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
- DualismDualismDualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
- Economic materialismEconomic materialismMaterialism is a mindset that views the consumption and acquisition of material goods as positive and desirable. It is often bound up with a value system which regards social status as being intrinsically linked to affluence as well as the perception that happiness can be increased through...
- Eliminative materialismEliminative materialismEliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
- ExistenceExistenceIn common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...
- French materialismFrench materialismFrench materialism is the name given to a handful of French 18th century philosophers during the Age of Enlightenment, many of them clustered around the salon of Baron d'Holbach...
- Grotesque bodyGrotesque bodyThe grotesque body is a concept, or literary trope, put forward by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of François Rabelais' work. The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble, and ideal to the material level...
- Historical materialismHistorical materialismHistorical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
- HumanismHumanismHumanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
- HyleHyleIn philosophy, hyle refers to matter or stuff. It can also be the material cause underlying a change in Aristotelian philosophy. The Greeks originally had no word for matter in general, as opposed to raw material suitable for some specific purpose or other, so Aristotle adapted the word for...
- IdealismIdealismIn philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
- Immaterialism
- MadhyamakaMadhyamakaMadhyamaka refers primarily to a Mahāyāna Buddhist school of Buddhist philosophy systematized by Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna may have arrived at his positions from a desire to achieve a consistent exegesis of the Buddha's doctrine as recorded in the āgamas...
- a philosophy of middle wayMiddle wayThe Middle Way or Middle Path is the descriptive term that Siddhartha Gautama used to describe the character of the path he discovered that led to liberation. It was coined in the very first teaching that he delivered after his enlightenment... - Material feminismMaterial feminismMaterial feminism examines the "material conditions under which social arrangements, including those of gender hierarchy, develop" It argues that "material conditions of all sorts play a vital role in the social production of gender"....
- Materialistic
- Marxist philosophy of natureMarxist philosophy of natureThere is no specific "Marxist philosophy of nature", as Karl Marx didn't conceive of Nature as separate from Society. As the young Marx exposed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, labor transforms Nature which becomes the "inorganic body" of Man...
- MatterMatterMatter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
- Metaphysical naturalismMetaphysical naturalismMetaphysical naturalism, also called ontological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, or just naturalism, is a philosophical worldview and belief system that holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences, i.e., those...
- Naturalism (philosophy)Naturalism (philosophy)Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
- Postmaterialism
- Physical ontology
- Philosophy of mindPhilosophy of mindPhilosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
- Quantum energy
- Rational egoismRational egoismIn ethical philosophy, rational egoism is the principle that an action is rational if and only if it maximizes one's self-interest. The view is a normative form of egoism. However, it is different from other forms of egoism, such as ethical egoism and psychological egoism...
- Reality in BuddhismReality in BuddhismBuddhism evolved a variety of doctrinal/philosophical traditions, each with its distinct ideas of reality. The following are still regularly studied in some branches of the Buddhist tradition: Theravada, Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Jojitsu, Madhyamika, Yogacara, tiantai, Huayan...
- Substance theorySubstance theorySubstance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears....
- TheravadaTheravadaTheravada ; literally, "the Teaching of the Elders" or "the Ancient Teaching", is the oldest surviving Buddhist school. It was founded in India...
- Transcendence (religion)Transcendence (religion)In religion transcendence refers to the aspect of God's nature which is wholly independent of the physical universe. This is contrasted with immanence where God is fully present in the physical world and thus accessible to creatures in various ways...
Further reading
- Buchner, L. (1920). Force and Matter. New York, Peter Eckler Publishing Co.
- Churchland, Paul (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. The Philosophy of Science. Boyd, Richard; P. Gasper; J. D. Trout. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.
- Flanagan, Owen (1991). The Science of the Mind. 2nd edition Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press.
- Fodor, J.A. (1974). Special Sciences, Synthese, Vol.28.
- Gunasekara, Victor A. (2001). "Buddhism and the Modern World". Basic Buddhism: A Modern Introduction to the Buddha's Teaching". 18 January 2008 .
- Kim, J. (1994) Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 52.
- La Mettrie, La Mettrie, Julien Offray deJulien Offray de La MettrieJulien Offray de La Mettrie was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment...
(1748). L'Homme Machine (Man a MachineMan a MachineMan a Machine is a work of materialist philosophy by the 18th-century French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, first published in 1748...
) - Lange, Friedrich A.,(1925) The History of Materialism. New York, Harcourt, Brace, & Co.
- Moser, P. K.; J. D. Trout, Ed. (1995) Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. New York, Routledge. Alternative ISBN 978-0140130690
- Schopenhauer, Arthur (1969). The World as Will and RepresentationThe World as Will and RepresentationThe World as Will and Representation is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in December 1818, and the second expanded edition in 1844. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann....
. New York, Dover Publications, Inc. - Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009). "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology". Mater Dei Institute
- Turner, M. S. (2007). Quarks and the cosmos. Science 315, 59–61.
- Vitzthum, Richard C. (1995) Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition. Amhert, New York, Prometheus Books.
External links
- Stanford Encyclopedia:
- Philosophical Materialism (by Richard C. Vitzthum) from infidels.org
- Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind on Materialism from the University of WaterlooUniversity of WaterlooThe University of Waterloo is a comprehensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The school was founded in 1957 by Drs. Gerry Hagey and Ira G. Needles, and has since grown to an institution of more than 30,000 students, faculty, and staff...