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In philosophy and metaphysics, materialism is a form of monism holding that matter is the fundamental Substance theory of nature, so that all things, including mind and consciousness, arise from material interactions and depend on physical processes, including those of the human brain and nervous system. It contrasts with monistic idealism, which treats consciousness as fundamental, and is related to naturalism, the view that only Scientific law and forces operate in the universe, and to physicalism, the view that all that exists is ultimately physical. Physicalism extends materialism by including forms of physicality beyond ordinary matter (e.g. spacetime, energy, forces, exotic matter), and some use the terms interchangeably.
Alternative philosophies opposed or alternative to materialism or physicalism include idealism, pluralism, dualism, solipsism, panpsychism, and other forms of monism.
In contemporary philosophy, the terms "materialism" and "physicalism" are often treated as interchangeable, though they have distinct histories. "Materialism" appears in English toward the end of the 17th century, while "physicalism" was introduced in the 1930s by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle as a linguistic thesis arguing for the translatability of all statements into physical language. One reason to prefer "physicalism" is that physics has revealed entities that are not matter in the classical sense of an inert substance; forces such as gravity are physical but not obviously "material" by the traditional understanding. Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition to include other scientifically observable entities such as energy, , and the spacetime continuum; some philosophers, such as Mary Midgley, suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined.Mary Midgley The Myths We Live By.
Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, 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 held this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics.Fodor, Jerry A. 1981. RePresentations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. . ( Excerpt of Ch. 1).
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 (c. 600–100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism (although their proofs of God and their positing that consciousness was not material precludes labelling them as materialists). Buddhist atomism and the Jainism school continued the atomic tradition.
Ancient Greek atomists like Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (99 – c. 55 BC) reflects 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 touch body but body" first appeared in Lucretius's work. Democritus and Epicurus did not espouse a monist ontology, instead espousing the ontological separation of matter and space (i.e. that space is "another kind" of being).
Epicureanism is a philosophy of materialism from classical antiquity that was a major forerunner of modern science. Classical atomism predates Epicurus: 5th‑century BCE thinkers Leucippus and Democritus explained all change as the collisions of indivisible atoms moving in the void. Epicureanism refined this materialist picture. Epicurus held that everything—including mind—consists solely of atoms moving in the void; to explain how parallel falling atoms could meet, he postulated the clinamen, an extremely slight lateral deviation that initiates collisions without supernatural causes and that need not imply genuine indeterminism.
In early 12th-century al-Andalus, Arabian philosopher Ibn Tufail ( Abubacer) discussed materialism in his philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan ( Philosophus Autodidactus), while vaguely foreshadowing historical materialism.Urvoy, Dominique. 1996. "The Rationality of Everyday Life: The Andalusian Tradition? (Aropos of Hayy's First Experiences)." pp. 38–46 in The World of Ibn Tufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān, edited by Lawrence Conrad. Brill Publishers, .
In England, materialism was developed in the philosophies of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Thomas Hobbes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), and John Locke (1632–1704). Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) became one of the most important materialist philosophers in the 18th century. John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822) believed matter has a moral dimension, which had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth (1770–1850).
In late modern philosophy, German atheist anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach signaled a new turn in materialism in his 1841 book The Essence of Christianity, which presented a Humanism account of religion as the outward projection of man's inward nature. Feuerbach introduced anthropological materialism, a version of materialism that views materialist anthropology as the universal science.Axel Honneth, Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 18.
Feuerbach's variety of materialism heavily influenced Karl Marx,Nicholas Churchich, Marxism and Alienation, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990, p. 57: "Although Marx has rejected Feuerbach's abstract materialism," Lenin says that Feuerbach's views "are consistently materialist," implying that Feuerbach's conception of causality is entirely in line with dialectical materialism." who in the late 19th century elaborated the concept of historical materialism—the basis for what Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined as scientific socialism:
Through his Dialectics of Nature (1883), Engels later developed a "materialist dialectic" philosophy of nature, a worldview that Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, called dialectical materialism.see Plekhanov, Georgi: 1891. "For the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel's Death;" 1893. Essays on the History of Materialism; and 1895. The Development of the Monist View of History. In early 20th-century Russian philosophy, Vladimir Lenin further developed dialectical materialism in his 1909 book Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which connects his opponents' political conceptions to their anti-materialist philosophies.
A more naturalist-oriented materialist school of thought that developed in the mid-19th century was German materialism, which included Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899), the Dutch-born Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893), and Carl Vogt (1817–1895),Owen Chadwick. 1990. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press.
p. 165: "During the 1850s German...scientists conducted a controversy known...as the materialistic controversy. It was specially associated with the names of Vogt, Moleschott and Büchner."
p. 173: "Frenchmen were surprised to see Büchner and Vogt.... The French were surprised at German materialism."
According to Marxist theoretician George Novack, despite the multiplicity of named schools, philosophy ultimately confronts a single binary: materialism versus idealism.
Scientific materialism is often synonymous with, and has typically been described as, a reductive materialism. In the early 21st century, Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland advocated a radically contrasting position (at least in regard to certain hypotheses): eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialism holds that some mental phenomena simply do not exist at all, and that talk of such phenomena reflects a spurious "folk psychology" and introspection illusion. A materialist of this variety might believe that a concept like "belief" has no basis in fact (e.g. the way folk science speaks of demon-caused illnesses).
With reductive materialism at one end of a continuum (our theories will reduce to facts) and eliminative materialism at the other (certain theories will need to be eliminated in light of new facts), revisionary materialism is somewhere in the middle.
In contrast, Christian List argues that the existence of first-person perspectives, i.e., one existing as oneself and not as someone else, refutes physicalism. List argues that since first-personal facts cannot supervene on physical facts, this refutes not only physicalism, but also most forms of dualism that have purely third-personal metaphysics.
In Being and Event (1988), Alain Badiou developed a materialist position using Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. Badiou argues that mathematics, rather than physics or human perception, reveals the metaphysical structure of reality, and that this structure is pure multiplicity without any foundational substance or unifying One.
Quentin Meillassoux has developed speculative materialism, a position that seeks to escape what he calls "correlationism", the post-Kantian view that thought cannot access reality independent of its relation to the subject.
One challenge to the conventional concept of matter as tangible "stuff" came with the rise of field physics in the 19th century. 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. In contrast, 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 universe's energy density is made up of the "matter" the Standard Model describes, and most of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, with little agreement among scientists about what these are made of.Bernard Sadoulet "Particle Dark Matter in the Universe: At the Brink of Discovery?" Science 5 January 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5808, pp. 61 - 63
With the advent of quantum physics, some scientists believed the concept of matter had merely changed, while others believed the conventional position could no longer be maintained. Werner Heisenberg 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."Heisenberg, Werner. 1962. Physics and philosophy: the revolution in modern science.
The concept of matter has changed in response to new scientific discoveries. Thus materialism has no definite content independent of the particular theory of matter on which it is based. According to Noam Chomsky, any property can be considered material, if one defines matter such that it has that property.Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
The philosophical materialist Gustavo Bueno uses a more precise term than matter, the stroma.
But not all conceptions of physicalism are tied to verificationist theories of meaning or direct realist accounts of perception. Rather, physicalists believe that no "element of reality" is missing from the mathematical formalism of our best description of the world. "Materialist" physicalists also believe that the formalism describes fields of insentience. In other words, the intrinsic nature of the physical is non-experiential.
Erwin Schrödinger said, "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.""General Scientific and Popular Papers." In Collected Papers, Vol. 4. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Vieweg & Sohn. p. 334.
Werner Heisenberg said the advent of quantum physics had undermined atomistic materialism. Specifically, he argued that the discovery of quantum entities existing as probability amplitudes rather than definite particles supports a mathematical, Platonic realism, rather than materialist, conception of physical reality, arguing that "modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans".
James Jeans concurred with Planck, saying, "The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter."Jeans, James. 1937. The Mysterious Universe. p. 137.
"All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception. This permanent cannot, however, be something in me…"
Postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers also express skepticism about any all-encompassing metaphysical scheme. Philosopher Mary MidgleyMary Midgley. 1990. The Myths We Live By. argues that materialism is a self-refuting idea, at least in its eliminative materialist form.Baker, L. 1987. Saving Belief. Princeton: Princeton University PressReppert, V. 1992. "Eliminative Materialism, Cognitive Suicide, and Begging the Question." Metaphilosophy 23:378–92.Seidner, Stanley S. 10 June 2009. "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology." Mater Dei Institute. p. 5.Peter Boghossian. 1990. "The Status of Content." Philosophical Review 99:157–84; and 1991. "The Status of Content Revisited." Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 71:264–78.
If matter and energy are seen as necessary to explain the physical world, but incapable of explaining mind, dualism results. Emergence, holism and process philosophy seek to ameliorate the perceived shortcomings of traditional (especially mechanistic) materialism without abandoning materialism entirely.
Some scientific materialists have been criticized for failing to provide clear definitions of matter, leaving the term materialism without any definite meaning. Noam Chomsky states that since the concept of matter may be affected by new scientific discoveries, as has happened in the past, scientific materialists are being dogmatic in assuming the opposite.
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