Word Finder - idealism

definition

The property of a person of having high ideals that are usually unrealizable or at odds with practical life.

definition

The practice or habit of giving or attributing ideal form or character to things; treatment of things in art or literature according to ideal standards or patterns;—opposed to realism.

definition

An approach to philosophical enquiry, which asserts that direct and immediate knowledge can only be had of ideas or mental pictures.

synonyms

• philosophical idealism

Idealism in one way or other supposes that mind is more real than matter.

Here then characteristically intuitionalism occupies a half-way house between empiricism, with its appeal to real given fact, and idealism, with its appeal to necessity.

With all its idealism, Greek thought had difficulty in regarding rational necessity as absolute master of the physical world.

Such vicissitudes were the ordinary lot of the Jews for several centuries, and it was their own inner life - the pure life of the home, the idealism of the synagogue, and the belief in ultimate Messianic redemption - that saved them from utter demoralization and despair.

If we answer " Yes " to that question, we pass on from intuitionalism to idealism - an idealism not on the lines of Berkeley (matter does not exist) but of Plato (things A obey an ascertainable rational necessity).

Whatever is to be said of ancient Idealism, the modern doctrine may be said notably in Kant to have been in the main a vindication of the subjective factor in knowledge.

His principle, however, was essentially sound, and led directly to the Platonic Idealism.

If there be any truth in this suggestion it seems likely that the last word of idealism, like the first, will prove to be that the type of the highest reality is to be sought for not in any fixed Parmenidean circle of achieved being but in an ideal of good which while never fully expressed under the form of time can never become actual and so fulfil itself under any other.

Yet the Megarians were by no means in agreement with the Platonic idealism.

The swellings on the palmar faces of the phalanges of the several fingers are also indicative, the 1st and and of the thumb respectively, of the logical faculty and of the will; the 1st, and and 3rd of the index finger, of materialism, law and order, idealism; those of the middle finger, humanity, system, intelligence; of the ring finger, truth, economy, energy; and of the little finger, goodness, prudence, reflectiveness.

At the same time, the repression of idealism and sentiment during the period of " illumination " was amply revenged, and the barren age of reason gave place to Romanticism.

But as to the greatness of his work, the profundity of his philosophy and the brilliance of his religious idealism, there can be no question.

The remarks made above would not apply to the coherent system of idealism which may be evolved from Kant's writings, and which many would consider alone to deserve the name of Kantianism or Criticism.

Passing to the more indirect influence of Laud on his times, we can observe a narrowness of mind and aim which separates him from a man of such high imagination and idealism as Strafford, however closely identified their policies may have been for the moment.

It is a proof of the strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to end culminated not in materialism, but in the boldest idealism.

This idealism, however, is also in its way a mark of intellectual bankruptcy.

The idealism of the new philosophy was too heavenly to be naturalized in the Byzantine empire, which stood more in need of police officials than of philosophers.

With Goethe, who viewed with interest and appreciation the poetical fashion of treating fact characteristic of the Naturphilosophie, he continued on excellent terms, while on the other hand he was repelled by Schiller's less expansive disposition, and failed altogether to understand the lofty ethical idealism that animated his work.

Fichtean idealism therefore at once stood out negatively, as abolishing the dogmatic conception of the two real worlds, subject and object, by whose interaction cognition and practice arise, and as amending the critical idea which retained with dangerous caution too many fragments of dogmatism; positively, as insisting on the unity of philosophical interpretation and as supplying a key to the form or method by which a completed philosophic system might be constructed.

But the Fichtean teaching appeared on the one hand to identify too closely the ultimate ground of the universe of rational conception with the finite, individual spirit, and on the other hand to endanger the reality of the world of nature by regarding it too much after the fashion of subjective idealism, as mere moment, though necessitated, in the existence of the finite thinking mind.

Hence the stress laid on will as the realizing factor, in opposition to thought, a view through which Schelling connects himself with Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, and on the ground of which he has been recognized by the latter as the reconciler of idealism and realism.

Beck maintains that the real meaning of Kant's theory is idealism; that of objects outside the domain of consciousness, knowledge is impossible, and hence that nothing positive remains when we have removed the subjective element.

In neither, however, are they a grammatical classification of words by their structure; and in neither are they a psychological classification of notions or general conceptions (voi uara), such as they afterwards became in Kant's Critique and the post-Kantian idealism.

Idealism has since followed it, and is the metaphysical doctrine that all things are mind and states of mind.

Aristotelianism intervenes between ancient Platonism and modern Idealism, and is the metaphysical doctrine that all things are substances, natural and supernatural and human.

Or are they, as modern Idealism says, mind and states of mind?

To this conclusion Berkeley seems, in the first place, to have been led by the train of reflection that naturally conducts to subjective or egoistic idealism.

To merely subjective idealism, sense percepts differ from ideas of imagination in degree, not in kind; both belong to the individual mind.

His theory is quite distinct from this, which really amounts to nothing more than subjective idealism.

Metaphysical idealism is the view that everything known is mind, or some mental state or other, which some idealists suppose to require a substantial soul, others not; while all agree that body has no different being apart from mind.

Idealism; Pragmatism; Relativity Of Knowledge, while separate discussions of ancient and medieval philosophers will be found in biographical articles and articles on the chief philosophical schools, e.g.

We shall return, then, to the clearer and more authoritative division, and proceed to discuss materialism, idealism and realism in their order.

Idealism was receding for the moment.

This then is his transfigured realism, which, as far as what is known goes, is idealism, but as far as what exists goes, realism - of a sort.

So far as this main point of transfigured realism is steadily maintained, it is a compound of idealism and realism, but not materialism.

By combining materialism with idealism he made consciousness a product of itself.

This occasionalism is not idealism, but its emphasis on the will of God gave it an idealistic tendency.

Spinozism, however, though it tramples down the barrier between body and soul, is not yet metaphysical idealism, because it does not reduce extension to thought, but only says that the same substance is at once extended and thinking - a position more akin to materialism.

It remained, however, for Schelling to convert this parallelism into identity by identifying motion with the intelligence of God, and so to transform the pantheism of Spinoza into pantheistic idealism.

Leibnitz, again, having become equally dissatisfied with Cartesianism, Spinozism and the Epicurean realism of Gassendi, in the latter part of his life came still nearer than Spinoza to metaphysical idealism in his monadology, or half-Pythagorean,half-Brunistic analysis of bodies into monads, or units, or simple substances, indivisible and unextended, but endowed with perception and appetite.

Up to this point, then, Leibnitz opened one of the chief avenues to metaphysical idealism, the resolution of the material into the immaterial, the analysis of bodies into mental elements.

According to one alternative, which consistently flowed from the psychological idealism of Descartes, as well as from his own monadism, he suggested that bodies are real phenomena; phenomena, because they are aggregates of monads, which derive their unity only from appearing together to our perceptions; real phenomena well founded, because they result from real monads.

He therefore concluded that all we know from the data of psychological idealism is impressions or sensations, ideas, and associations of ideas, making us believe without proof in substances and causes, together with " a certain unknown, inexplicable something as the cause of our preceptions."

We have here, in this sceptical idealism, the source of the characteristically English form of idealism still to be read in the writings of Mill and Spencer, and still the starting-point of more recent works, such as Pearson's Grammar of Science and James's Principles of Psychology.

This second position is a new form of metaphysical idealism, containing the supposition, which lies at the foundation of later German philosophy, that since understanding shapes the objects out of sensations, and since nature, as we know it, consists of such objects, " understanding, though it does not make, shapes nature," as well as our knowledge.

Fichte now set himself in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) to make transcendental idealism into a system of metaphysical idealism without Kant's inconsistencies and relics of realism.

Fichte thus transformed the transcendental idealism of Kant by identifying the thing with the object, and by interpreting noumenon, not in Kant's sense of something which speculative reason conceives and practical reason postulates to exist in accordance with the idea, but in the new meaning of a thought, a product of reason.

Here he was for the first time grappling with a fundamental difficulty in metaphysical idealism which is absent from realism, namely, the difficulty of explaining the identity of a thing, e.g.

Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant's Kritik, is the theor y on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego.

Lastly, Fichte called this system realism, in so far as it posits the thing in itself as another thing; idealism, in so far as it posits it as a noumenon which is a product of its own thinking; and on the whole real idealism or ideal realism.