Transcript Idealism
The Nature of the Person Idealism Idealism is... The theory that everything we know is in the mind The theory that reality is mental not material The idea that it is the ‘inner’ not the ‘outer’ world which is real, and from which everything else derives. In other words: The only thing we actually perceive is our senseimpressions; we ASSUME that there are material objects causing those impressions, but we can never check that they are really there, or really like our perceptions of them. It might be more rational to admit that it is sense-impressions that we know, and that we have no proof that anything ‘behind’ the impressions exists. Mel Thompson’s Example “I may think that I am typing this book into a real, actual computer. I may feel my fingers on the keyboard. But does it really exist? What do I actually know? I know the feeling in my fingers and the visual experiences of shapes on a screen - in other words, what I know are the ideas, the interpretations of experience that my mind puts together and calls ‘my computer.’” The Matrix The film explores the idealist belief that the world we experience is entirely a creation of our minds… (however, it also suggests that there IS a reality beyond the mind…) Idealist Philosophers 1: Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1646-1716 Everything can be reduced to monads, which are so small that they cannot be considered as having a material existence at all; they are mental realities. Idealist Philosophers 2: Berkeley Bishop George Berkeley 1685-1753 A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Knowledge ‘Esse est percipi’ All things exist in the mind of God Berkeley’s Argument Just like thoughts and imaginings, sensations too cannot exist without a mind which perceives them. We have no reason to believe things exist outside the mind. We can only be sure they exist when we are perceiving them. Things do really exist, but as ideas, not as matter. Our own identity, therefore, is as minds with ideas, not as physical material realities. Why do things exist when I’m not looking? There was a young man who said ‘God Must think it exceedingly odd, If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there’s no one around in the Quad. Because…. (Ronald Knox) Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd. I am always about in the Quad. And that’s why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God. Idealist Philosophers 3: Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 17701831 founder of dialectical logic, by which any idea generates its opposite, and the two ideas then struggle until a higher synthesis is achieved. Idealist Philosophers 3: Hegel We never experience the world directly through the senses: the mind creates patterns from sensations whose source we cannot know; We cannot know that material objects actually exist; The universe has a rational soul, the Absolute Spirit, from which we and all else come; History is a process of the gradual selfdevelopment of the Absolute Spirit. Is idealism convincing? Dr Johnson on Berkeley’s idea: ‘I refute it thus’