Abstract

Vesey argues in his introduction that the history of idealism would be worth studying even if it turned out that there is no single sense of "idealism." Just to discover how the term "idea" has evolved in philosophical usage can elucidate the history of philosophy. The majority of the essays in this book focus on a single philosopher or school of philosophy, and so do not raise the problem of defining idealism in general. However, as each author develops a working definition for his own historical purposes, several senses of "idealism" emerge. Most of these writers define idealism as the doctrine that all we can know are our ideas and the meaning of words and sentences, that truth consists of the coherence of our ideas, and that we cannot directly observe external reality as it is in itself Some writers adopt variations on this, either to the effect that objects exist for a subject or to the effect that objects are structured by a subject. Some authors interpret idealism as the view that truth is created by human activity and thought, one identifies idealism with mental monism, and two suggest that any use at all of the word "idea" as a philosophical first principle is enough to constitute an "idealism". There is an implicit attempt to cover most if not all major periods of idealist or allegedly idealist philosophy in this collection, including Greek skepticism, Descartes and Berkeley, Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Marx, Bradley, linguistic relativism, and Wittgenstein. Some articles consider idealism in so far as it raises questions of epistemology and consciousness, others in so far as it raises questions of freedom, action, and will. However, there is no treatment of the role of idealism in mediaeval or modern religious philosophy, and there is no mention of the phenomenology of the lived body, which constitutes so much of the response of twentieth century philosophers to problems of idealism.