The aim of this paper is to offer a general survey of the latest development of metaphysical idealism in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. It consists of five main parts. The first part is a short introduction, it states the position of idealism and its current status in the Anglophone world. The second part focuses on the negative programme of idealism, which challenges physicalism on the problem of matter (2.1) and the problem of consciousness (2.2). The third part (...) illustrates the positive programme of idealism, whose varieties can be grouped into two principal types: constitutive and elementary. Constitutive idealism (3.1) is subdivided into the theocentric (3.1.1), the anthropocentric (3.1.2), and the acentric (3.1.3). Elementary idealism (3.2), on the other hand, can be unity-based (3.2.1), language-based (3.2.2), or knowledge-based (3.2.3). The six categories form a general framework of metaphysical idealism, and various accounts in the existing literature are discussed under each category. The fourth part addresses the relation between idealism and panpsychism. The paper is concluded with some caveats and future prospects. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 7, July 2022.

ABSTRACT The exponential expansion of mindfulness-based applications in education, psychology and psychotherapy, workplace training and mind/body well-being in general over the last few decades has been accompanied by wide-ranging claims about the impact of mindfulness on the brain. Arguments in this sphere have been supported by data taken from neuroscience reporting changes in the brain structure and function of participants following mindfulness-based courses and personal meditation practice. The principal aim of this article is to inspect some of these claims and (...) arguments in the light of Iain McGilchrist’s lifelong work on the asymmetric or divided brain. In particular, the idea of the brain as the sole or main generator of phenomenal consciousness will be questioned, along with the notion of left-brain shifting which mindfulness theorists equate with the mediation of negative emotions. The key ideas of McGilchrist on the nature of mind and consciousness are paralleled by similar perspectives offered by new idealist scientists and philosophers such as Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman and Steve Taylor, and the article concludes with an examination of the implications of these radical ideas for the spiritual traditions that provide the foundations for mindfulness theory and practice. (shrink)

Idealism, Metaphysics and Community examines the place of idealism in contemporary philosophy, and its relation to problems of metaphysics, political thought, and the study of the history of philosophy. Drawing together contributions from philosophers from several distinct traditions, this book presents a range of perspectives - revealing areas of agreement and disagreement, addressing topics of contemporary discussion, and providing new insights into philosophical idealism. Following an extensive introduction by the editor, and drawing on the work of the (...) Canadian idealist, Leslie Armour, the book is divided into three main parts: Part 1 focuses on the British idealist, F.H.Bradley; Part 2 examines metaphysical issues and idealism, such as the realism/anti-realism debate, the relation of classical and idealist metaphysics, rational psychology, time and eternity, and the divine; Part 3 draws on idealism to address contemporary concerns in ethical theory, political philosophy, social philosophy and culture and the history of philosophy. Presenting new insights into the work of classical authors as well as contemporary philosophers, this book provides a better understanding of classical idealism and addresses important areas of contemporary philosophical, social and political concern. (shrink)

Schelling’s 1809 Freiheitsschrift, perhaps his most widely read work, presents considerable difficulties of understanding. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of the work in relation to Kant. My focus is on the relation in each case of their theory of human freedom to their general metaphysics, a relation which both regard as essential. The argument of the paper is in sum that Schelling may be viewed as addressing and resolving a problem which faces Kant’s theory of freedom and transcendental (...) idealism, deriving from the challenge posed by Spinozism. One major innovation in Schelling’s theory of human freedom is his claim that it presupposes the reality of evil. I argue that Schelling’s thesis concerning evil also provides a key to the new and highly original metaphysics of the Freiheitsschrift. The relation of Schelling’s theory of freedom to his general metaphysics is therefore complex, for it goes in two directions: the metaphysics are not simply presupposed by the theory of freedom but are also in part derived from it. These new metaphysics also, I argue, allow Schelling to resolve a problem which his own earlier Spinozistic system had left unresolved. (shrink)

Idealism is the view that reality is fundamentally mental. Idealism has been influential historically, but it has been neglected in contemporary metaphysical debate. This volume of 17 essays by leading philosophers rectifies the situation.

Since the ages of the Old Testament, the Homeric myths, the tragedies of Sophocles and the ensuing theological speculations of the Christian millennium, the theme of loneliness has dominated and haunted the Western world. In this wide-ranging book, philosopher Ben Lazare Mijuskovic returns us to our rich philosophical past on the nature of consciousness, lived experience, and the pining for a meaningful existence that contemporary social science has displaced in its tendency toward material reduction. Engaging key metaphysical discussions on (...) causality, space, time, subjectivity, the mind body-problem, personal identity, freedom, religion, and transcendence in ancient, scholastic, modern, and contemporary philosophy, he highlights the phenomenology of loneliness that lies at the very core of being human. In challenging psychoanalytic and neuroscientific paradigms, Mijuskovic argues that isolative existence and self-consciousness is not so much of a problem of unconscious conflict or the need for psychopharmacology as it is the loss of a sense of personal intimacy. The issue of the criteria of "personal identity" in relation to loneliness has long engaged and consumed the interest of theologians, ethicists, philosophers, novelists and psychologists. This book will be of great interests to academics and students of the humanities, and all those with an interest in the philosophy of loneliness.. (shrink)

This dissertation engages critically with the metaphysical implications of the respective transcendentalisms of Husserl, Deleuze, and Kant in an attempt to disclose their largely untapped resources for a renewed consideration of the ability of science to grasp reality as it is in-itself. Chapter 1 examines the metaphysical implications of Husserl’s critique of natural scientific objectivity in his later transcendental philosophy in connection to his early formulations of phenomenological objectivity around the axis of the distinction between metaphysics as the (...) science of real Being and formal ontology as the science of Being in the most universal sense. I argue that Husserl’s phenomenological metaphysics constitutes a framework in which the ideal Being of the transcendental dimension of experience operates as the condition for the possibility of natural scientific objectivity. Chapter 2 scrutinizes Deleuze’s characterization of intensity as a transcendental concept rather than a scientific one against the background of his metaphysics of difference and his critique of the shortcomings of Kant’s transcendental idealism for addressing the transcendental conditions for the genesis of real experience. Through a reading of Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference and intensity in connection to his confinement of the creative productivity of scientific thought to a plane of reference, I argue that the creativity apropos to the scientific engagement with material reality necessitates that such creativity is conditioned by the same transcendental considerations operative in a metaphysics of difference at a broad scale. Against the backdrop of Husserl’s and Deleuze’s respective criticisms of the inadequacy of Kant’s transcendental idealism for articulating the material component of experience, Chapter 3 studies Kant’s later iv conception of ether as the simultaneously empirical and transcendental condition for the possibility and unity of experience. Through an examination of Kant’s renewed understanding of materiality as the necessary and sufficient condition for scientific objectivity in connection with the problematic objectivity of the transcendental ideas created by pure reason in Kant’s Critical philosophy, I suggest that Kant’s later articulation of materiality on transcendental grounds simultaneously addresses the objectivity and the creativity pertinent to the encounter of scientific Thought with material/physical reality. (shrink)

This article discusses the main arguments of Hedwig Conrad-Martius against the worldview of idealism in connection to her phenomenological idea of reality. The discussion focuses on her most far-reaching critical argument concerning the damage caused by idealism to the possibility for metaphysics by turning the real into the ideal, thereby reducing reality to an idea. This article analyses Conrad-Martius’ understanding of the evolution of idealism and of her criticism regarding the metaphysical absolutizing of the ideal in (...) idealism. Her subsequent response to idealism attempts to rehabilitate the facticity of real reality within metaphysics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Existential Component of Realism Realism in its Regulative/Pragmatic Aspect The Role of Presumption The Role of Retrovalidation Retrospect.

It is sometimes said that changes in academic philosophy in the twentieth century reflected a process in which a discipline that had been earlier closely tied to institutional religion became increasingly laicized and secularized.1 In line with this idea, the idealist philosophy that had flowered within British philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century can look like the last and ill-fated attempt of a Victorian religious sensibility to guard itself against a post-Darwinian God-less view of the world and ourselves.2 (...) Such a view generally represents, I believe, the attitudes of many contemporary philosophers to British philosophy prior to the transforming work of Russell and Moore of about one hundred years ago. Against the luxuriant and mystical metaphysics of the idealists, fuelled by religious longing, the “new philosophy”, it is thought, affirmed the brute materiality of the world and its independence from mind, be it divine or human. A similar development is commonly understood as carrying from Hegel through the “young Hegelians” to the mature Marx. Thus for Feuerbach, for example, Hegel’s idealist doctrine that “nature or reality is posited by the idea” was “merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God”.3 Hegel’s philosophy had thus provided a “last place of refuge and ... rational support of theology”, and escaping from this condition (more prison than refuge) required rejecting idealism and confronting the fact that “the true relation of thinking and being is simply this. Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a predicate such as... (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new reading of transcendental idealism. For a start, I endorse Allison’s rejection of the traditional so-called two-world view and, hence, of Guyer and Van Cleve’s ontological phenomenalism. But following Allais, I also reject Allison’s metaphysical deflacionism: transcendental idealism is metaphysically committed to the existence of things in themselves, noumena in the negative sense. Nevertheless, in opposition to Allais, I take Kant’s claim that appearances are “mere representations” inside our minds seriously. In (...) the empirical sense, appearances are the undetermined object of our sensible intuition. Yet, in the transcendental sense, appearances are nothing but the mind-dependent way that noumena manifest inside our minds and, hence, our mind-dependent way of knowing the mind-independent reality in itself (epistemological phenomenalism). (shrink)

One of Kant’s central central claims in the Critique of Pure Reason is that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. This claim has been regarded as problematic in a number of ways: whether Kant is entitled to assert both that there are things in themselves and that we cannot have knowledge of them, and, more generally, what Kant’s commitment to things in themselves amounts to. A number of commentators deny that Kant is committed to there (...) actually being an aspect of reality which we cannot cognise; they argue that he is committed merely to the idea that we cannot avoid the concept of things as they are in themselves. I will argue in this paper that while transcendental idealism is partly an epistemological position, it is also partly a metaphysical position, and in specific, that Kant is committed to the claim that the things we cognise have, in addition to the way they appear to us, a nature that is independent of us, which we cannot cognise. (shrink)

The book offers a systematic reconstruction of the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger from the former's perspective, but without falling into any form of Husserlian apologetics. The main thesis is that Husserl's critique of Heidegger's existential analytics as a form of philosophical anthropology entails a deeper fundamental thesis, namely that Heidegger confuses the object of first philosophy (the transcendental determination of the subject) with metaphysics (in the Husserlian sense of the expression). Addressing the Husserl-Heidegger confrontation, this text provides the first (...) systematic reconstruction of Husserl's conception of the system of philosophy from the perspective of his later works, with a special focus on the Cartesian Meditations. At stake in Husserl's critique of Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time is the refusal to transcendentalize the irrational aspects and nature of our human existence. This first volume addresses Husserl's doctrine of transcendental idealism with the aim of elucidating the distinction between first philosophy, second philosophies and what Husserl calls last philosophy. This volume appeals to students and researchers. (shrink)

What is arguably the central criticism of Hegel’s philosophical system by the Continental tradition, a criticism which represents a unifying thread in the diverse work of Schelling, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Adorno, is that Hegel fails to adequately do justice to the notion of individuality. My aim in this paper is to counter the claim that Hegel’s idea of the concrete universal fails to properly explain the real uniqueness of individuals. In what follows, I argue that whilst the Continental critique (...) (as it is particularly expressed by Adorno) is prima facie attractive, it is ultimately misguided. This is because the critics of Hegel fail to correctly understand (i) his principal argument in Sense-Certainty; (ii) crucial features of his logico-metaphysics; and (iii) his notion of wholeness. I contend that carefully explicating these important parts of the Hegelian system not only shows that Hegel’s metaphysical commitments are not those which do not leave meaningful room for or make adequate sense of individuality, but that they also reveal a sophisticated treatment of the interdependency between the categories of individuality, particularity and universality in a way which conceives of individuality robustly. (shrink)

The received view of the anti-metaphysics of Camap's Aufbau finds that it rests exclusively on verificationism. Alberto Coffa has recently put forward an interpretation of the antimetaphysical stance that claims that Camap was confusedly moving from ontological to semantical ideahsm. After raising objections to both of these views another interpretation is put forward. The crucial aspect of Camap's rejection of metaphysics rests on his reinterpretation of epistemology as the logic of objective knowledge. This leads to a rejection of metaphysics inasmuch (...) as the peculiar status of logic as the framework constitutive of the possibility of rational inquiry means that it neither needs nor allows of completion or interpretation by traditional metaphysics. This view of Camap's is compared to the views of the Marburg and Southwest NeoKantians. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This dissertation defends Berkeley's spirit-based Idealism by way of providing an interpretation of the fundamental distinction of his metaphysics, the "active/passive" distinction. I argue that Berkeley developed a distinctively normative reading of "activity" and "passivity" during the exploration of the limits of Lockean-style empiricism recorded in his preparatory notebooks, the Philosophical Commentaries, limits that became especially apparent in connection with the notion of the self or "spirit". After considering and rejecting a proto-Humean "bundle theory" of the self, Berkeley formulated (...) the irreducibly normative conception of "spirit" characteristic of all his published works. In Berkeley's hands, 'spirit' is what Locke would have called a "forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit." The active/passive distinction consequently concerns one's responsibility for something: If a spirit is "active" with respect to X, then X is dependent upon that spirit's will, and, correlatively, it is responsible, answerable, or accountable for X. If a spirit is "passive" with respect to X, then it is not responsible for X. Since Berkeley's idealism is notoriously a spirit-based ontology, the consequences of these understandings were sweeping and dramatic. In the balance of the dissertation I pursue the implications of this interpretation with respect to Berkeley's view of semantics, ontological commitment, knowledge of other minds, and freedom and determinism. (shrink)

A major work by one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, published here in English for the first time.

Idealism offers a distinctive perspective on the methods of philosophical inquiry and on the nature of reality. In the version that dominated Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a strong emphasis on the search for unity, for the connections between and among the diverse aspects of experience, and the many spheres of human interest, such as natural science, psychology, ethics, and politics. While each distinct science or area of study tries to explain and to provide (...) a coherent account of the phenomena falling within its sphere, such studies are limited in that they must begin from various conceptions, or “working hypotheses,” as Bradley often called them. It is the unique role of metaphysical inquiry to attempt to get behind and beyond these assumptions and lay everything bare to the questioning mind. (shrink)

An essential trait distinguishing the history of occidental thought from the leading trends of American and Asian philosophies may be found in a rather curious fact. The entire fabric of development and all progress of European philosophy, emerging and uniting out of numerous components, has always taken place as a kind of regress; that is, as a return to the past which sought in every epoch to ascertain its ancient, Greek origins. Continuity, in this connection, means less the identity of (...) philosophical problems and themes than the constant return and effort of a reflective recovery of ancient culture as the immanent basis of all further developments. Hence λόγοσ, νοῦσ and ἰδέα have remained the main criteria with respect to which empirical reality and human comportment sought their truth and justification. It is this decisive reference of ἀλήθεια which from the beginnings of European thinking until our day has been developed in the framework and according to the model of light. As sense structure of truth, light has served as the metaphor in relation to which the sense of being is open, graspable, transparent—that is, dominated by insight. (shrink)

The book offers a systematic reconstruction of the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger from the former's point of view, but without falling into any form of Husserlian apologetics. The main thesis is that Husserl's critique of Heidegger's existential analytics as a form of philosophical anthropology entails a deeper fundamental thesis, namely, that Heidegger confuses the subject matter of first philosophy (the transcendental subject) with metaphysics (in the Husserlian sense of the expression). At stake in Husserl's critique of Heidegger's philosophy in (...) Being and Time is the refusal to transcendentalize the irrational aspects of our human existence. This second volume focuses on the question of being, clarifying the distinction between ontology and metaphysics in Husserl's thought. In fact, contrary to a long-standing and established interpretive tradition, according to which Husserl's phenomenology is metaphysically neutral, the book shows to what extent Husserl always understood as the ultimate goal of his philosophizing the positive foundation of a metaphysics. This volume appeals to students and researchers. (shrink)

It is maintained that abstract objects are literally entia rationis: their being lies in being conceived and their nature is inextricably entangled with the operation of minds.

In the Principles of Psychology William James enunciated the well-known statement: “Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly”. And although in this work he never regarded metaphysics to be central to his purpose of establishing psychology as a natural science, he nonetheless sketched a theory of the nature of metaphysics.

It is maintained that abstract objects are literally entia rationis: their being lies in being conceived and their nature is inextricably entangled with the operation of minds.

The Wang-Chang-Chiang-Yao counterrevolutionary "Gang of Four" carried out revisionism, sowed seeds of discord and resorted to intrigues and plots in an attempt to usurp the Party, seize power, and restore capitalism. Ambition is the source of hypocrisy and falsehood and, of course, of the hypocrisy and falsehood of metaphysics and idealism. The more audacious the "Gang of Four's" ambition to usurp the Party and seize power became, the more barefaced its manifestation of metaphysics and idealism was. Metaphysics and (...) idealism were the faulty ideological weapons they used in the attempt to usurp the Party and seize power. We must follow Chairman Mao's teachings to liquidate the "Gang of Four's" counterrevolutionary revisionist political and ideological line and its crime of impudently trampling on Marxist-Leninist philosophy and Chairman Mao's glorious philosophical thought and protect the purity of Marxism. (shrink)

The familiar narrative about the early days of analytic philosophy tells us of its triumph over the needless metaphysical excesses of its immediate forerunners, the idealists. In one form or another, idealism was the paramount philosophical view of the 19th century. Nowadays, however, the bulwarks of idealism are largely abandoned. Few defend the view, and fewer still are willing to take the time to consider its claims seriously. Materialism and dualism dominate the philosophical landscape.

According to the standard view of his metaphysics, Leibniz endorses idealism: the thesis that the world is made up solely of minds or monads and their perceptual and appetitive states. Recently,this view has been challenged by some scholars, who argue that Leibniz can be seen as admitting corporeal substances, that is, animals or embodied souls, into his ontology, and that, therefore, it is false to attribute a strict idealism to him. Subtler accounts suggest that Leibniz begins his philosophical (...) career as an advocate of (some form of) the modern ‘mechanical’ philosophy and ends his career as an idealist, raising the issue when and why Leibniz adopts his monadological metaphysics. This article argues that, given a constellation of metaphysical, logical, and theological views, Leibniz is committed to the ontological primacy of mind or form even in his ‘middle years’. (shrink)

Charles Taylor's influential exposition of Hegel made the doctrine of expressivism of central importance and identified Herder as its exemplary historical advocate. The breadth and generality of Taylor's use of ?expressivism? have led the concept into some disrepute, but a more precise formulation of the doctrine as a theory of meaning can both demonstrate what is worthwhile and accurate in Taylor's account, and allow us a useful point of entry into Herder's multifaceted philosophy. A reconstruction of Herder's overall philosophical position, (...) centred around a refined theory of what this paper labels ?Herderean expressivism?, reveals a naturalistic, teleological metaphysics. This metaphysics fulfils the Hegelian aim of providing what Dieter Henrich has called a ?feedback loop? between ontology and epistemology. Exploring Herder's expressivism, therefore, helps further the case for his decisive impact on Hegel's philosophy. Herder's methodological naturalism, however, represents an obstacle to Hegel's absolute idealism. (shrink)

John Preston has contended that Paul Feyerabend retreated from his earlier commitment to realism and consciously embraced a ‘voluntarist’, social constructionist, idealism. Though there seems to be unmistakable subjective idealist statements in some of Feyerabend's writings, it will be argued that Feyerabend's idealistic period was short-lived, and that he returned to a form of realism in his later writings. Specifically, Feyerabend's distinction between theoretical/abstract and empirical/historical traditions of thought, when understood with Feyerabend's re evaluation of Bohr's philosophy of quantum (...) physics in mind, is most aptly interpreted as aprocess realist position. Preston, in interpreting Feyerabend as a voluntarist, social constructionist, subjective idealist, fails to distinguish the ever-present rhetorical and provocative statements of Feyerabend's from the core arguments being presented. (shrink)

Although contemporary powers metaphysics largely understands itself as a metaphysical realist undertaking, recently powers have come to the surface also within an idealist context. This paper aims to characterize and motivate an absolute idealist conception of powers. I compare realist and idealist powers metaphysics in their respective responses to Humean scepticism concerning powers, thereby motivating the claim that the very idea of a power is actually best understood as an idealist idea. I continue to characterize the absolute idealist’s understanding (...) of power, for which it is necessary to see that the content of her power notion is inseparable from the way in which she arrives at that notion. I close with a brief reflection on the absolute idealist’s understanding of the power of thought, which is where idealist and realist powers metaphysics diverge most radically. (shrink)

When first published in 1953, metaphysical idealism was still the dominant philosophy of India. This volume depicts the metaphysical strands of the life and philosophy of India in the light of those of the West and brings out the deeper implications of idealistic metaphysics.