Materialism

From New World Encyclopedia

In philosophy, materialism is a monistic (only one kind of thing exists) ontology that holds that all that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, everything is material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. 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. It also differs from dual-aspect monism. Materialists thus deny the existence of God or a spiritual world.

Science uses a working assumption, sometimes known as methodological naturalism, that observable events in nature are to be explained only by natural causes without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural. 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.

Dialectical and historical materialism derived from the thought of Karl Marx was the ideology of Communist states in the twentieth century. It claimed that human social relations, culture and institutions were determined by the productive relations (types of ownership) which in turn were determined by the forces of production (the level of technology).

The biggest challenge materialists have faced is to define what matter is. Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of matter to include invisible scientific postulates such as energy, forces, and the curvature of space as well as dark matter and dark energy which exist in mathematical equations but are scientifically undetectable. Philosophers such as Mary Midgley suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined.[1]

The other problem that materialism has is to explain is consciousness. Materialists claim that mental events are merely complex chemical interactions taking place in the brain. Yet it is unclear how one gets from chemical reactions and neurological impulses to consciousness and how electrical impulses in the optic nerve give rise to the vivid view we have. Furthermore if thoughts are merely chemical interactions why should we pay any attention to them and ascribe truthfulness to some and falsehood to others. Finally a materialistic explanation is reductionist and so must explain human behaviour in terms of physical causes, impulses and responses and not in terms of free choice and thoughtful decisions. By doing so it undermines ethics which presupposes human free will and concomitant responsibility.

The religious critique of materialism is that it does not take account of and explain the plurality of human experience which includes experiences of a non material reality such as the divine and the spiritual world. It also focuses exclusively on the here-and-now observable 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

Ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, and even Aristotle 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," "Fire" 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."

The poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius recounts 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 mechanistic explanations for phenomena, like erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound, that would not become accepted for more than 1500 years. Famous principles like "nothing can come from nothing" and "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in the works of Lucretius.

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 Ancient Indian philosophy, materialism developed around 600 B.C.E. with the works of Ajita Kesakambali, Payasi, Kanada, and the proponents of the Cārvāka school of philosophy. Kanada was one of the early proponents of atomism. The Nyaya-Vaisesika school (600 B.C.E. - 100 B.C.E.) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism. The tradition was carried forward by Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school. Later Indian materialist Jayaraashi Bhatta (6th century CE) in his work Tattvopaplavasimha ("the Upsetting of all principles") refuted the Nyaya Sutra epistemology. The materialistic Cārvāka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400 C.E.

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 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.[2]

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 pineal 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 who 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 asserted that matter is naturally in motion. Moreover, by turning the idealist dialectics of 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.

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, under 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.

Defining matter

The nature and definition of matter have been subject to much debate[3], as have other key concepts in science and philosophy. Is there a single kind of matter which everything is made of (hyle), or multiple kinds? Is matter a continuous substance capable of expressing multiple forms (hylomorphism)

Without question science has made unexpected discoveries about matter. Some paraphrase departures from traditional or common-sense concepts of matter as "disproving the existence of matter". However, most physical scientists take the view that the concept of matter has merely changed, rather than being eliminated.

One challenge to the traditional concept of matter as tangible "stuff" is 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, quantum field theory models fields as exchanges of particles — photons for electromagnetic fields and so on. On this view it could be said that fields are "really matter".

All known solid, liquid, and gaseous substances are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. All three are fermions or spin-half particles, whereas the particles that mediate fields in quantum field theory are bosons. Thus matter can be said to divide into a more tangible fermionic kind and a less tangible bosonic kind. However it is now known that less than 5% of the physical composition of the universe is made up of such "matter", 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[4]. 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"[5]

Some philosophers feel that these dichotomies necessitate a switch from materialism to physicalism. Others use materialism and physicalism interchangeably.[6]

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • 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. ISBN 0199264791 ISBN 0028949501
  • Flanagan, Owen (1991). The Science of the Mind. 2nd edition Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press. ISBN 0262560569
  • 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. ISBN 0415225256
  • Moser, P. K.; J. D. Trout, Ed. (1995) Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. New York, Routledge. ISBN 0415108632 ISBN 0415108640
  • Reese, William L. (2nd. ed. 1996), Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion. Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press. ISBN 1573926213
  • Schopenhauer, Arthur, (1969) The World as Will and Representation. New York, Dover Publications, Inc. ISBN 0486217612
  • Vitzthum, Richard C. (1995) Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition. Amhert, New York, Prometheus Books. ISBN 1573920274
  • Buchner, L. (1920). Force and Matter. New York, Peter Eckler Publishing CO.
  • La Mettrie, Man The machine. ISBN 1419132288 ISBN 1425004016

External links

General Philosophy Sources

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  1. Mary Midgley The Myths We Live By.
  2. Dominique Urvoy, "The Rationality of Everyday Life: The Andalusian Tradition? (Aropos of Hayy's First Experiences)", in Lawrence I. Conrad (1996), The World of Ibn Tufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān, pp. 38-46, Brill Publishers, ISBN 9004093001.
  3. "Matter". Catholic Encyclopedia. (1913). New York: Robert Appleton Company.
  4. Bernard Sadoulet Particle Dark Matter in the Universe: At the Brink of Discovery? Science 5 January 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5808, pp. 61 - 63
  5. eg C S Lewis in The Great Divorce suggested that Heaven was composed of super-massive matter that was more substantial than normal matter
  6. Dictionary of the Philosophy of mind — "Many philosophers and scientists now use the terms `material' and `physical' interchangeably"