Word Finder - materialism

definition

Constant concern over material possessions and wealth; a great or excessive regard for worldly concerns.

definition

The philosophical belief that nothing exists beyond what is physical.

definition

Material substances in the aggregate; matter.

Metaphysical materialism is the view that everything known is body or matter; but while according to ancient materialists soul is only another body, according to modern materialists mind without soul is only an attribute or function of body.

But Leibnitz's conception of the priority of spirit had too little foundation, and the different elements he sought to combine were too loosely related to one another to stand the strain of the two forces of empiricism and materialism that were opposed to his idealism.

True materialism includes theism.

It might seem, indeed, that Stoicism indicates a falling off from Plato and Aristotle towards materialism, but the ethical dualism, which was the ruling tendency of the Stoa, could not long endure its materialistic physics, and took refuge in the metaphysical dualism of the Platonists.

Objections to the belief in immortality have been advanced from the standpoints of materialism, naturalism, pessimism and pantheism.

This narrow materialism was the true cause of his fatal influence both in church and state.

It is not difficult to discern the influence of naïve materialism in contemporary thinking.

The influence of an advancing study of nature, which was stimulated if not guided by Bacon's writings, is seen in the more careful doctrines of materialism worked out almost simultaneously by Hobbes and Gassendi.

With the two last named he discussed the materialism of Priestley and the theory of necessitarianism.

In view of the results of this analysis, Reid's theory (and the theory of Scottish philosophy generally) has been dubbed natural realism or natural dualism, in contrast to theories like subjective idealism and materialism or to the cosmothetic idealism or hypothetical dualism of the majority of philosophers.

At the same time a class of men arose interested in these forms for their own sake, professional lawyers Bence, but also "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth," and the belief in sacraments such as the Lord's Supper, a piece of religious materialism of which "the necessary consequences are superstition and immorality."

The cause of medical materialism is the natural bias of physicians towards explaining the health and disease of mind by the health and disease of body.

The highest form of the doctrine is scientific materialism, by which term is meant the doctrine so commonly adopted by the physicist, zoologist and biologist.

Anyhow, whatever the method or interpretation is to be, idealism, even more fully than materialism, is pledged to monism and to the rejection of dualism.

A wide missionary activity had begun in the 13th century - an activity which was the product of the Crusades and the contact with the Moslem which they brought, but which yet helped to check the Crusades, substituting as it did peaceful and spiritual conquests of souls for the violence and materialism of even a Holy War.

His book on Materialism and Empiric Criticism (1909) heaps abuse on idealistic philosophers and religious teachers of all schools and creeds.

On the one hand, his whole formulation of Evolution in mechanical terms urges him in the direction of materialism, and he attempts to compose the mind out of homogeneous units of consciousness (or" feeling ")" similar in nature to those which we know as nervous shocks; each of which is the correlative of a rhythmical motion of a material unit or group of such units "(§ 62).

Determinism had other forms besides that of a crude materialism, and the direction that Malebranche succeeded in giving to speculation led only to the more complete denial of freedom and individuality in the all-devouring pantheism of Spinoza.

All these inspiring metaphysical and moral doctrines the pupil accepted from his master's dialogues, and throughout his life adhered to the general spirit of realism without materialism pervading the Platonic philosophy.

But the materialism of modern times is more subtle than that of Hobbes.

The arguments of thorough-going materialism can in most cases be met with a direct negative.

The encouraging thing is there is a whole group of people starting to rise up who are challenging this materialism.

Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and Herbert Spencer are not systematic materialists, but show tendencies towards materialism.

See METAPHYSICS; and Lange's History of Materialism.

If this conception is ".4lecha regarded as full and absolute truth, it involves materialism.

Pantheism does not favour free will or immortality, and may move indefinitely near to materialism.

In his last work Fechner, aged but full of hope, contrasts this joyous "daylight view" of the world with the dead, dreary "night view" of materialism.

Stahl's chief aim was to oppose materialism.

His moral attitude is also far removed from that of ordinary ancient Epicureanism or of modern materialism.

This philosophy, called Empirio-criticism, is not, however, a realistic but an idealistic dualism, nor can it be called materialism.

Lamettrie has been called "the Aristippus of modern materialism."

Without war the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism."

The strength of materialism consists in recognizing nature without explaining it away, its weakness in its utter inability to explain consciousness either in its nature or in its origin.

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

Several causes, beginning towards the end of the 18th century, gradually led up to the materialism of Moleschott, Vogt and Buchner, which flourished in the middle of the 19th century.

Meanwhile, philosophic forces to counteract materialism were weak.

These causes, scientific, industrial and philosophical, led to the domination of materialism in the middle of the 19th century in Germany, or rather to its revival; for in its main position, that matter and motion are everything and eternal, it was a repetition of the materialism of the i 8th century in France.

But the new materialism was not mere repetition.

Thus in presence of the problem which is the crux of materialism, the origin of consciousness, he first propounds a gratuitous hypothesis that everything has mind, and then gives up the origin of conscious mind after all.

Curiously enough, he supposes that by making mind a universal attribute of matter he has made his philosophy not materialism, but monism.

Materialists seem to dread the word " materialism."

Buchner also entreats us " to abandon the word ` materialism,' to which (it is not clear why) a.

But if a philosophy makes force an attribute of matter only, as his does, it will recognize nothing but matter possessing force, and will therefore be materialism as well as monism, and in short materialistic monism.

This is materialism.

So Avenarius (q.v.) was no materialist, but only an empiricist anxious to reclaim man's natural view of the world from philosophic incrustations; yet when his Empiriokriticismus ends in nothing but environment, nervous system, and statements dependent on them, without soul, though within experience, he comes near to materialism, as Wundt has remarked.

In France, again, positivism is not materialism, but rather the refusal to frame a metaphysical theory.

Now, when in surrendering theology and metaphysics we have also to surrender God and the soul, we are not free from materialism.

The point of this philosophy is not materialism, but realism.

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

But it is not maintained, on the side either of phenomena or of noumena; and hence its tendency to materialism.