Materialism

Origin

Materialism is the view that everything that exists is physical: matter, or whatever the fundamental physical entities turn out to be. As a philosophical position it is as old as philosophy itself. In ancient Greece, the atomists — above all Democritus and, later, Epicurus — argued that reality consists of atoms moving in the void, and that everything else, including mind and soul, is an arrangement of atoms. The word "materialism" itself entered the European languages in the seventeenth century, attached to the revival of atomism and mechanism in early modern philosophy. The position was developed against two adversaries: the Platonic and Christian doctrine of immaterial soul and immaterial Forms, and the Cartesian dualism that divided reality into two substances, mind and matter.

History

Materialism has had a peculiar history: repeatedly refuted, repeatedly revived, and finally victorious in a qualified form. The ancient atomism of Democritus was eclipsed by Plato and Aristotle and survived mainly as a rumor about philosophy. It was revived in the seventeenth century by the new mechanical philosophy: Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651) and De Corpore, argued that everything real is body and motion, including the human mind — a scandalous claim in his time. In the eighteenth century the French materialists — La Mettrie, whose Man a Machine (1747) made the scandal explicit, and Diderot — developed the position into a comprehensive naturalism. The nineteenth century added the two most influential materialisms of the modern world: the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, which made material conditions the basis of history and society, and the scientific naturalism that accompanied the rise of biology, chemistry, and physics.

In the twentieth century, materialism was transformed by the sciences themselves. The discovery that the physical world is not composed of "matter" in the old sense — that mass is energy, and that the fundamental entities of physics are fields, quanta, and structures — prompted the shift from "materialism" to "physicalism": the view that everything that exists is whatever physics says exists. Physicalism is now the default position in analytic philosophy and the philosophy of mind, though the old questions about consciousness, value, and meaning remain.

Core Principles

The core principles of materialism can be stated precisely. First, ontological priority: everything that exists is physical, and any purported non-physical entity — soul, spirit, mind, abstract object — either does not exist or is reducible to physical facts. Second, the closure of the physical: every physical event has a sufficient physical cause; the physical world is causally complete. Third, the dependence of the mental: mental states, if they exist, depend on physical states — they are realized in, supervene on, or are identical with physical states. Fourth, methodological naturalism: the sciences of the physical world are the fundamental way of finding out what exists and how it behaves.

These principles can be held with different degrees of strength. The weakest is the supervenience thesis: no two worlds can differ in all their mental facts without differing in some physical fact. The strongest is eliminative materialism: the mental as ordinarily conceived does not exist, and the vocabulary of mind will be replaced by the vocabulary of the brain sciences. In between lie identity theory (mental states are brain states), functionalism (mental states are functional states realized in physical systems), and the various forms of non-reductive physicalism. What unites them is the denial of the dualist claim that mind is a separate substance.

Important Figures

Democritus (c. 460–370 BCE) is the founder: the first philosopher known to have worked out a complete atomistic system, in which everything, including perception and thought, is explained by atoms in motion. Epicurus (341–270 BCE) refined atomism and gave it an ethics; his school survived for centuries as the main carrier of the materialist tradition. Thomas Hobbes revived materialism in the seventeenth century and applied it to politics and psychology: his famous claim that "all that exists is body" made him the first systematic materialist of the modern era. La Mettrie and Diderot developed the French Enlightenment's version. Karl Marx gave materialism its most consequential form for history and society: historical materialism holds that the material conditions of production structure social life, politics, and consciousness. In the twentieth century, the leading figures are the identity theorists (Herbert Feigl, J.J.C. Smart, U.T. Place) and the physicalists who followed them.

Modern Influence

Materialism — in its contemporary form, physicalism — is the default ontology of the modern sciences and of most professional philosophy. Physics, chemistry, and biology all assume that the world is physical, and the success of those sciences is the strongest argument for the position. In the philosophy of mind, the debate has largely moved from whether physicalism is true to how it is true: how consciousness, intentionality, and normativity can be accommodated within a physical world. In ethics and political philosophy, the materialist tradition continues in the form of naturalism: the view that moral and political facts are grounded in natural facts. And in the wider culture, materialism functions both as the default scientific worldview and as a standing challenge — the suspicion that a purely physical picture of reality leaves out something essential is the motive behind most contemporary philosophy of mind.

Criticism

Materialism has been criticized from several directions. The most persistent objection is the problem of consciousness: the facts of subjective experience — what it is like to see red, to feel pain — seem to resist capture in physical terms. The dualists and the "hard problem of consciousness" theorists argue that no physical account explains why there is experience at all. Anti-reductionists argue that mental, moral, and semantic facts are real but not reducible to physical facts, so that the materialist thesis is either false or trivial. The idealist tradition, from Berkeley to Hegel, argues that matter itself is a concept constructed by mind, and that the materialist puts the cart before the horse. And critics of historical materialism argue that the attempt to explain culture, religion, and ideas by material conditions ignores the autonomy of the symbolic. None of these objections has dislodged physicalism from its default status; each has defined the terms in which it must be defended.

Sources

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Materialism" (iep.utm.edu/material)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Physicalism" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism)
• Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651. Ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Mind-Body Problem" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-body)