Idealism in Brief

By -
From philosopher Keith Ward:
What idealists maintain is that the ultimate nature of reality itself is mind-like, and that human and other finite minds are the best clues we have to what objective reality is like. The cosmos is not a mindless, unconscious, valueless, purposeless, yet somehow strangely intelligible, mechanism. Such a view is the result of extrapolating a machine-model, very useful in many scientific contexts, to provide the most comprehensive and adequate picture of the real cosmos.

Idealists propose that the human mind provides a better model from which to extrapolate to the cosmos as a whole. That is not because the cosmos looks like a very large human person or because there is some large person hovering just beyond the cosmos. It is because human minds play a creative and constructive role in producing the phenomenal world. They seem to point to a level of reality that is not merely phenomenal or an appearance to consciousness. Human minds generate an idea of reality as mind-like in a way that far transcends human mentality, yet that does include something like consciousness, value, and purpose as essential parts of its nature. (More Than Matter, p. 58)
 (Hat tip to Lee M.: if you follow the link, there is a video as well.)

Comments

  1. gcallah2:38 PM

    Ken, here's how to have your comments deleted at this blog: make sure they're absolutely devoid of intellectual content, and then throw in an insult to boot.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown3:56 PM

    Gene,

    Thank you. I don't know why Bob Murphy puts up with him over at Free Advice. I understand the need to be Christian and therefore be kind, but this doesn't imply that you need to let people treat you rudely.

    Just a quick question; I thought that Idealism had died out in philosophy, with G.E. Moore supposedly delivering a critical argument against it.

    What are your thoughts? I apologize if I'm ignorant; I'm a beginning philosophy major!

    ~Alex

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah5:34 PM

      Alex, Moore held up his hands and said their presence refuted idealism, as if idealists thought people did not have hands! It is the most ridiculous "refutation" of a philosophical idea ever offered.

      Delete
  3. Unknown7:22 PM

    So, aside from the book that you quoted from (and that I have bought online already), is there anything else that you would recommend...?

    Also, has Idealism died out in philosophy...?

    I know that this is a little off topic, but I'm a former atheist who has 'reconverted' back to his old religion of Catholicism, and I'm excited to find so many very good Christian philosophers!

    ReplyDelete

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