Idealism

Idealism is the family of philosophical theories that assert the primacy of ideas or even their independent existence. They claim that reality, or the reality that we can know, is fundamentally a construct of the mind or immaterial. Idealism assumes that objects cannot have existence without a mind that is aware of them. In order to know things, consciousness, ideas, the subject and thought must be taken into account.

Materialism rejects idealism. Idealism is not exactly antagonistic to realism as there are idealistic philosophies (objective idealism) that postulate an existence of abstract objects independent of the observer.

Epistemologically, idealism manifests itself as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing anything independent of our mind. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas, especially beliefs and values, shape society. As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit. Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories, which do not attribute priority to the mind. An extreme version of this idealism may exist in the philosophical notion of solipsism.

In 1781 Immanuel Kant published his famous Critique of Pure Reason, rejecting both positions and proposing an alternative. According to Kant, although all our knowledge begins with experience, not everything originates from it, since there are certain structures of the subject that precede all experience, as they are the conditions that make it possible. Nineteenth-century philosophy was largely characterized as a reaction to his philosophy, beginning with the development of German idealism.

Some influential idealists included Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Francis Herbert Bradley.

Variants

Objective idealism

Ideas exist by themselves and we can only learn or discover them through experience. For the objective idealist, all others are ideas without a material body. Some representatives of objective idealism are Leibniz, Hegel, Bernard Bolzano, Dilthey.

Subjective idealism

Subjective idealism, or empirical idealism, is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. Subjective idealism implies and is generally identified or associated with Berkeley's immaterialism, according to which material substance does not exist. For him, things are ideas perceived by the mind.

In general, subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism; in fact, it is the opposite of eliminatory materialism, the doctrine that all or some classes of mental phenomena (such as emotions, beliefs, or desires) do not exist, but are merely illusions.

The main characteristic of subjective idealism is that everything revolves around the knowing subject (a thinking being that performs the act of knowledge). And there are, in turn, two variants:

• The radical version maintains that the subject builds the world: things do not exist by themselves but only things exist for us (ontological constructivism). According to this conception, nature has no independent existence.
• The moderate version affirms that "things are the color of the glass through which they are seen."

Science and technology do not interfere with idealism, since both depend above all on the perception of the external world to modify it according to knowledge. Where the perception itself is not a theme contrary to idealism.

Merely asserting that ideas are important does not qualify you as idealistic. Almost all materialists and realists admit the existence and importance of ideas, they only deny their self-existence.Representatives of subjective idealism are: Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, Mach, Cassirer and Collingwood.

Platonic idealism

Platonic realism is a philosophy that supports the idea of ​​realism about the existence of universals according to the Greek philosopher Plato, who lived between 427 a. C.– 347 BC C., student of Socrates, and teacher of Aristotle. Confusingly, this position is also called platonic idealism.Plato's proper expression of realism about the existence of universals is set forth in his

Republic, and elsewhere, chiefly in the

Phaedo, the

Phaedrus, the

Meno, and the

Parmenides.

Transcendental idealism

Transcendental idealism or transcendental subjectivism is an epistemological and metaphysical conception proposed by the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century.

Briefly stated, transcendental idealism establishes that all knowledge requires the existence of two elements: the first, external to the subject (the given, or material principle), that is, an object of knowledge. The second, proper to the subject (the position, or formal principle), which is nothing more than the very subject that he knows. Regarding the second, Kant affirms that the conditions of all knowledge are not set by the known object, but by the knowing subject. The knowing subject introduces certain forms that, not existing in reality, are essential to understand it. This is why Kant maintains in the Critique of Pure Reason: "Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind" (A51). In other words, without sensitivity nothing would be given to us and without understanding nothing would be thought.Everything intuited in space and time, and with it all the objects of our possible experience, is nothing more than phenomena, that is, mere representations, which, in the way they are represented, as an extended substance or series of alterations, have no meaning. own independent existence apart from our thought. I call this concept transcendental idealism.

Critique of Pure Reason, A491, B519What falls under our ability to know is called a phenomenon. That which is outside is called a noumenon.

German idealism

German Idealism is a philosophical school that developed in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German idealism distinguishes:

• The phenomenon (from the Greek fainomai to show or appear) is the object as it is known (as it "appears" in front of the senses and the intelligence)
• The noumenon (from the Greek noeo to understand or intellectively) is the object as it would be in itself ("the thing in itself")

German Idealism emerged from the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, closely linked to Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and the historical context of the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars. The main thinkers of the movement were, in addition to Kant himself: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. The last three reacted strongly to

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Philosophers of lesser stature, such as Jacobi, Schulze, Reinhold, and Schleiermacher, also belong to the school.

Absolute idealism

Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy attributed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. As a form of idealism, it consists of Hegel's consideration of how being is ultimately understandable as an integral whole. Hegel asserted that for the thinking subject (human reason or consciousness) to be able to know its object (the world) there must be, in some sense, an identity of thought and being. Otherwise, the subject would not have access to the object and we would not have any certainty about our knowledge of the world. To take into account the differences between thought and being, however, as well as the richness and diversity of each, the unity of thought and being cannot be expressed as the abstract identity "A = A". Absolute idealism is the attempt to demonstrate this unity using a new "speculative" philosophical method, which requires new concepts and rules of logic. According to Hegel, the absolute ground of being is essentially a dynamic and historical process of necessity that develops itself through increasingly complex forms of being and consciousness, ultimately giving rise to all the diversity of the world and the concepts with which to think and giving meaning to existence.The absolute idealist position was dominant in the nineteenth century in Germany, Great Britain, and to a lesser degree in the United States. The absolute idealist position must be distinguished from the subjective idealism of Berkeley, the transcendental idealism of Kant, or the idealisms of Fichte and Schelling.