Philosophical Idealism Quiz

Philosophical Idealism: A Summary

• Idealism in philosophy posits that reality is inseparable from perception and understanding, and that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas.

• There are two categories of idealism: subjective idealism and objective idealism.

• Epistemologically, idealism is accompanied by philosophical skepticism about the possibility of knowing the existence of anything independent of the human mind.

• Ontologically, idealism asserts that the existence of things depends upon the human mind.

• Idealism holds that consciousness (the mind) is the origin of the material world.

• Indian and Greek philosophers proposed the earliest arguments that the world of experience is grounded in the mind's perception of the physical world.

• Hindu idealism and Greek neoplatonism gave panentheistic arguments for the existence of an all-pervading consciousness as the true nature, as the true grounding of reality.

• Beginning with Kant, German idealists such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel dominated 19th-century philosophy.

• Idealism as a philosophy came under heavy attack in the West at the turn of the 20th century.

• Transcendental idealists like Kant affirm idealism's epistemic side without committing themselves to whether reality is ultimately mental.

• Objective idealists like Plato affirm reality's metaphysical basis in the mental or abstract without restricting their epistemology to ordinary experience.

• Subjective idealists like Berkeley affirm both metaphysical and epistemological idealism.Overview of Idealism Philosophies

• There is a modern scholarly disagreement on whether Yogacara Buddhism can be classified as a form of idealism.

• Vasubandhu's works refute external objects and argue that the true nature of reality is beyond subject-object distinctions.

• Dharmakirti's view of the apparent existence of external objects is summed up by him in the Pramānaṿārttika.

• Some writers see Vasubandhu as closer to an epistemic idealist like Kant, while others see him as a metaphysical idealist.

• Subjective idealism describes a relationship between experience and the world in which objects are no more than collections or bundles of sense data in the perceiver.

• Arthur Collier published similar assertions to subjective idealism to Berkeley's "immaterialism."

• Epistemological idealism is a subjectivist position in epistemology that holds that what one knows about an object exists only in one's mind.

• Transcendental idealism, founded by Immanuel Kant, maintains that the mind shapes the world we perceive into the form of space-and-time.

• Objective idealism asserts that the reality of experiencing combines and transcends the realities of the object experienced and of the mind of the observer.

• Absolute idealism is G.W.F. Hegel's account of how existence is comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole.

• Kierkegaard criticized Hegel's idealist philosophy in several of his works, particularly his claim to a comprehensive system that could explain the whole of reality.

• Hegel's absolute idealism blurs the distinction between existence and thought, and his philosophy of Spirit focuses on the interrelation between individual humans.Idealism in Philosophy

• Climacus believes that submitting one's will to the State denies personal freedom, choice, and responsibility.

• Hegel agrees with Kierkegaard that both reality and humans are incomplete, but the relation between time and eternity is outside time and this is the "logical structure" that Hegel thinks we can know.

• Bradley saw reality as a monistic whole apprehended through "feeling", a state in which there is no distinction between the perception and the thing perceived.

• Actual idealism is the idea that reality is the ongoing act of thinking, or in Italian "pensiero pensante".

• Gentile theorizes that thoughts can only be conjectured within the bounds of known reality; abstract thinking does not exist.

• Pluralistic idealism such as that of Gottfried Leibniz takes the view that there are many individual minds that together underlie the existence of the observed world and make possible the existence of the physical universe.

• Personalism is the view that the minds that underlie reality are the minds of persons.

• Howison maintained that both impersonal, monistic idealism and materialism run contrary to the experience of moral freedom.

• J. M. E. McTaggart argued that minds alone exist and only relate to each other through love. Space, time and material objects are unreal.

• Thomas Davidson taught a philosophy called "apeirotheism", a "form of pluralistic idealism...coupled with a stern ethical rigorism".

• Idealist notions took a strong hold among physicists of the early 20th century.

• There are various philosophers working in contemporary Western philosophy of mind who have recently defended an idealist stance.