How much do you know about Materialism?

Materialism: A Summary

• Materialism is a philosophical monism that asserts matter as the fundamental substance of nature and all things, including consciousness, are a result of material interactions.

• Materialism is related to physicalism, which views all that exists as ultimately physical, incorporating more sophisticated notions of physicality than mere ordinary matter.

• Philosophies opposed to materialism include idealism, pluralism, dualism, panpsychism, and other forms of monism.

• Epicureanism, an ancient philosophy of materialism, was a major forerunner to modern science.

• Materialism belongs to the class of monist ontology and is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism.

• Materialism is often associated with reductionism, but non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion.

• Materialism developed in several geographically separated regions of Eurasia during the Axial Age, including ancient Indian philosophy, ancient Greek atomists, and Chinese thinker Wang Chong.

• In the late modern philosophy, Ludwig Feuerbach introduced anthropological materialism, which heavily influenced Karl Marx's concept of historical materialism.

• Contemporary analytic philosophers operate within a broadly physicalist or scientific materialist framework, and revisionary materialism is somewhere in the middle of the continuum between reductive and eliminative materialism.

• Contemporary continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze has attempted to rework and strengthen classical materialist ideas, and new materialism has become its own specialized subfield of knowledge.

• The nature and definition of matter have occasioned much debate, with the advent of quantum physics and the discovery of dark matter and dark energy challenging conventional positions.

• Materialism has no definite content, and the concept of matter has changed in response to new scientific discoveries.Critiques and Alternatives to Materialism

• Materialism is a philosophical concept that asserts that everything in existence can be explained by physical matter, independent of any theory of matter.

• In philosophical materialism, G. Bueno redefines the term matter for philosophy and defines a more precise term, the stroma.

• Physicalists believe that no "element of reality" is missing from the mathematical formalism of our best description of the world.

• Most of Hinduism and transcendentalism regard all matter as an illusion, or maya, blinding humans from knowing the truth.

• Some 20th-century physicists and modern-day physicists and science writers have argued that materialism is flawed due to certain recent scientific findings in physics, such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory.

• Proponents of digital physics view information rather than matter to be fundamental.

• Immanuel Kant argues against materialism in defending his transcendental idealism.

• Arguments for idealism, such as those of Hegel and Berkeley, often take the form of an argument against materialism.

• If matter and energy are seen as necessary to explain the physical world, but incapable of explaining mind, dualism results.

• Some critics object to materialism as part of an overly skeptical, narrow, or reductivist approach to theorizing.

• John Polkinghorne objects to what he calls promissory materialism, preferring dual-aspect monism to materialism.

• Some scientific materialists have been criticized for failing to provide clear definitions for what constitutes matter, leaving the term materialism without any definite meaning.