Materialism

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In philosophy, materialism is a monistic (only one kind of thing exists) ontology that holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. Science uses a working assumption, sometimes known as methodological naturalism, that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural. As a monist ontology, materialism is different from ontological theories based on dualism (two kinds of existence) or pluralism (more than one kind of existence). In terms of singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism stands in sharp contrast to idealism, which is also a monistic ontology that holds that the only thing that can be said to truly exist is idea, or immaterial substance. Materialists have often been determinists, holding to the claim that "There is a cause for every event," although that view is not required in order to be a materialist, and present-day quantum theory tends to reject it.

Besides its use in philosophical ontology, materialism is frequently contrasted with various forms of spiritualism or idealism. In ethics, to say that someone is a materialist often consists of a criticism of that person, a claim that the person is too much concerned with material things or money and not enough concerned with his spirituality or with some non-material ideals. In religion, materialism is usually presented as wrong because it is thought to be a focus on the here-and-now observable world as opposed to the spiritual and invisible world.

Overview

One of the first detailed descriptions of the philosophy occurs in the scientific poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, in his recounting of the mechanistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena are the result of different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called "atoms." De Rerum Natura provides remarkably insightful, mechanistic explanations for phenomena, such as erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound, that would not become accepted for more than 1500 years. Famous principles such as "nothing can come from nothing" and "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in this most famous work of Lucretius.

The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most 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 sometimes allied with the methodological principle of 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, a more general level than the reduced one. 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" such as psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of, say, basic physics. A vigorous literature has grown up around the relation between these views.

Materialism typically contrasts with dualism, phenomenalism, idealism, and vitalism. The definition of "matter" in modern philosophical materialism extends to all scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, and the curvature of space. In this sense, one might speak of the "material world".

Materialism has frequently been understood to designate an entire scientific, rationalistic world view, particularly by religious thinkers opposed to it, who regard it as a spiritually empty religion. Marxism also uses materialism to refer to the scientific world view. It emphasizes a "materialist conception of history", which is not concerned with metaphysics but centers on the empirical world of actual human activity (practice, including labor) and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see historical materialism, or materialist conception of history).

History and Varieties of Materialism

Numerous varieties of materialism have been held or advocated. Some of the most noteworthy will be mentioned here.

According to William L. Reese, the earliest systematic accounts of materialism appeared in India between the 9th and 7th centuries B.C.E., but this movement is known only through supposed refutations given by its opponents. (Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, 457)

Ancient Greek philosophers such as Thales, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, and others prefigure later materialists. Thales began the process of attempting to answer the question "What exists, as the foundation or basis for all existence?" with a naturalist materialist-physicalist response — as distinguished from a supernatural or religious answer — by proposing water as that fundamental stuff. Other ancient Greeks answered the question with "Air," or "The Boundless." Still other ancient Greeks developed the doctrine of atomism, the view that the smallest lump or particle of physical existence is an atom, meaning "that which cannot be cut."

Aristotle, in his theory of hylemorphism, or matter-form combination as the internal cause of a thing, held that material is the foundation or substrate of form — form and matter always appear together in his view. Matter is the foundation of extension. Two things with the same form — for example, two fish that are alike because they come from the same spawn, or two leaves that look alike, or two coins from the same mint using the same dies to produce them — are distinguished and separated by their being two different lumps of matter.

In China, Xun Zi developed a Confucian doctrine that was oriented on realism and materialism. Other notable Chinese materialists include Yang Hsiung and Wang Chong.

In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi revived the materialist tradition, in opposition to René Descartes' attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. For Descartes, body (material) and mind (immaterial) are completely different substances without any commonality or similarity in their natures; thus he was left with the enormous problem of attempting to explain how body and mind can interact, a problem he never succeeded in solving except through his wholly unsatisfactory and ad hoc claim that it occurs through the pituitary gland. Hobbes extended materialism by using it to account for language and epistemology. Gassendi accounted for the operations of the physical world including sensation through materialism, but he also held to an active intellect in humans and to a God in the universe.

Later materialists included Denis Diderot and other French enlightenment thinkers, as well as Ludwig Feuerbach.

The leading philosophers of the nineteenth century — Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Mill, and the British and American idealists — were all idealists or phenomenalists. Schopenhauer, for example, wrote that "...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself." (The World as Will and Representation, II, Ch. 1). 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. He wrote:

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) [a]ll 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." (Ibid., I, §7)

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), and T.H. Huxley in Man's Place in Nature (1863) presented a materialist account of the origin of biological structures and species, including man, and today's adherents of Darwinist and neo-Darwinist evolution are mostly materialists.

Unlike Aristotle and the Aristotelians, who had held that the natural state of matter is to be at rest and that motion occurs only when there is an active mover causing matter to be in motion, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed — correctly — that matter is naturally in motion. Moreover, by turning the idealist dialectics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel upside down, they claimed that both qualitative and quantitative changes in matter occur through a process of dialectic; they called this dialectical materialism and they also accounted for historical changes with a materialist account of the course of historical development, known as historical materialism. The central or most important aspects of historical materialism, according to the Marxists, are the development of private ownership of land and other material things and means of production, and the class struggle between the owning bourgeois class and the non-owning working class.

In the United States there was a non-dialectical form of materialism that is sometimes called Naturalism. Two of its many members were George Santayana and John Dewey.

By the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the influence of Ernst Mach and other positivists, philosophical materialism came into prominence again, especially in the 20the century. The members of the Vienna Circle and the Logical Positivists were almost all materialists. One issue faced by the Logical Positivists was how to give a materialist account of statements about minds. Rudolf Carnap, for the most important example, held that

...the meaning of any statement consisted in those directly testable statements deducible from it (protocol sentences). The protocol sentences must be intersubjectively testable, and the only intersubjectively testable sentences refer to physical properties of physical entities. Hence, those meaningful statements about minds which do not deal with hypothetical constructs must refer to such physical properties and entities, even though we cannot yet give their physical translations. The beginnings of translation into behaviorist terms was offered for some psychological expressions...("Materialism," by Keith Campbell, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, p. 183)

In recent years, Paul and Patricia Churchland have advocated eliminativist materialism, which holds that mental phenomena simply do not exist at all — that talk of the mental reflects a totally spurious "folk psychology" that simply has no basis in fact, something like the way that folk science speaks of demon-caused illness.

Today's scientific materialism is based on and contains a complex understanding of elementary sub-atomic particles — leptons, quarks, photons, and whatever other particles are discovered or proposed, along with the properties of each of those particles — plus forces and energy and force-fields and whatever other such are discovered or postulated, along with the realization of a relation between matter and energy as expressed in Einstein's famous formula e-mc2.

References
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  • Churchland, Paul (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. The Philosophy of Science. Boyd, Richard; P. Gasper; J. D. Trout. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.
  • Edwards, Paul, Ed. in Chief (1967). The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 Vols.. New York and London: Macmillan.
  • Flanagan, Owen (1991). The Science of the Mind. 2nd edition Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press.
  • Fodor, J.A. (1974) Special Sciences, Synthese, Vol.28.
  • Kim, J. (1994) Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 52.
  • 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.
  • Reese, William L. (2nd. ed. 1996), Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion. Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press.
  • Schopenhauer, Arthur, (1969) The World as Will and Representation. New York, Dover Publications, Inc.
  • Vitzthum, Richard C. (1995) Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition. Amhert, New York, Prometheus Books.
  • Buchner, L. (1920). Force and Matter. New York, Peter Eckler Publishing CO.
  • La Mettrie, Man The machine.

External links

General Philosophy Sources

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