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- Dictionaryidealism/ʌɪˈdɪəlɪz(ə)m/
noun
- 1. the unrealistic belief in or pursuit of perfection: "the idealism of youth"
- 2. any of various systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of mind.
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Idealism is the view that reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness, or that knowledge is based on mental structures. Learn about the history, types, and arguments of idealism in philosophy, from Plato to Kant to contemporary thinkers.
Sep 20, 2024 · Idealism is a view that stresses the central role of the ideal or the spiritual in the interpretation of experience. It may hold that reality exists as spirit or consciousness, that abstractions and laws are more fundamental than sensory things, or that whatever exists is known through and as ideas.
Idealism is the belief that your ideals can be achieved or the philosophy that objects are ideas in the mind of God or people. Learn more about the meaning, usage and history of idealism with examples and translations.
- I. Definition
- II. Types of Idealism
- III. Idealism vs. Materialism
- IV. Famous Quotes About Idealism
- V. The History and Importance of Idealism
- VI. Idealism in Popular Culture
- VII. Controversies
In popular usage, an idealist is someone who believes in high ideals and strives to make them real, even though they may be impossible. It’s often contrasted with pragmatist or realist, i.e. someone whose goals are less ambitious but more achievable. This sense of “idealism” is very different from the way the word is used in philosophy. In philosop...
Idealism doesn’t have well-defined sub-schools, but here are some labels for the purpose of this article:
The opposite of idealism is materialism, or the view that reality is material instead of conceptual. For materialists, the physical world is the only true reality. Our thoughts and perceptions are part of the material world just like other objects. Consciousness is a physical process in which one chunk of matter (your brain) interacts with another ...
Quote 1
Scottish philosopher David Hume famously showed that we can’t prove that there is a stable self-identity over time. That is, how can you prove that your present self is the same as the self in your baby pictures? There is no way to prove scientifically that anyone has a stable “Self” that persists over time, and yet it’s one of our strongest intuitions — of course I’m me!There are many ways to answer, including one based on modern genetics (which Hume could not have imagined), but another is...
Quote 2
James Jeans was a British scientist and mathematician, and a great defender of ontological idealism. In this quote, he shows the overlap between ontological idealism and divine idealism. That is, he sees scientific reality as an expression of some fundamental ideas — but he also believes that those ideas are not just floating out there in the abstract, instead arguing that a great “universal mind” contains the ideas. Although he doesn’t use the word “God,” this could be taken as a kind of div...
Idealism can be traced back to Plato, who developed the doctrine of the Eternal Forms. This doctrine was kind of an early form of what we’ve been calling ontological idealism: Plato held that all the objects we see around us are instances of abstract concepts. These abstract concepts are like numbers: if you have four apples or four cats or four do...
Example 1
What if all of reality, as we know it, was a computer program? This is the premise of The Matrix, and at first it looks like an idealist view: after all, a computer program is just an idea, an arrangement of information, not a physical object. (Computer programs are contained in physical circuits, of course, but you can copy a program from one hard drive to another and it’s still the same program — that’s what it means to say that it’s an idea.) However, in The Matrixwe discover that there is...
Example 2
In an episode of South Park (“The Tooth-Fairy-Tats”), Kyle becomes obsessed with figuring out whether there is any such thing as reality. He reads Descartes as well as several books on Taoismand quantum mechanics, ultimately becoming convinced that nothing is real. After suffering an existential crisis through most of the episode, he finally settles on a kind of mild subjective idealism. He doesn’t necessarily argue that there is no such thing as the outside world, but he does argue that we h...
Materialism vs. Idealism: a Difference that Makes no Difference?
E=MC2 is a description of reality. (materialism) E=MC2 is part of reality itself. (idealism) At the end of the day, what is the difference between these two statements? Is there any practical difference, or a difference that might cause us to behave in a different way? Some philosophers (and many non-philosophers) argue that this is an important test for any philosophical debate. If there is no practical difference, then it’s probably a moot question, one that really doesn’t need to be resolv...
Aug 30, 2015 · This entry discusses philosophical idealism as a movement chiefly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although anticipated by certain aspects of seventeenth century philosophy and continuing into the twentieth century.
Idealism is the practice of forming ideals or living under their influence, or a theory that reality lies in a realm transcending phenomena. Learn more about the word history, synonyms, examples, and related terms of idealism.
Idealism is a philosophical view that mind, spirit, or ideas are the most fundamental kinds of reality, or at least govern our experience of the world. It is opposed to materialism, naturalism, and realism. See examples, history, and related words.