What Is Idealism?

By -
Working on my paper on Berkeley, I have come up with the following list of different meanings with which the word "idealism" has been used:

• A focus on ideals as opposed to pragmatic interests. It is used this way in common speech, but also sometimes by political theorists: noble idealism. (Harrington)
• The belief that in history, the ideas of agents are the true driving force: personal historical idealism. (Weber, Protestant Ethic)
• The belief that in history, ideas writ-large are the true driving force: impersonal historical idealism. (Hegel: the cunning of reason)
• The notion that the world is entirely made up of thinking / experiencing entities: pan-psychism. (Peirce, Whitehead)
• The idea that the structure of our reality is determined by our (human) minds: transcendental idealism. (Kant)
• The notion that the physical world is, in some sense, an illusion. (Vasubandhu: Yogacara)
• The belief that what we think we know about the physical world is really only our own ideas. (Rorty)
• The belief that the physical world is, in fact, made up of ideas. (Berkeley)

Does anyone know of any other uses

UPDATE: Found one more already:

• Ideal values have a real existence as archetypes. (Plato)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more