Idealism
Definitions

Idealism is a term with several related meanings. It comes via Latin idea from the Ancient Greek idea (ἰδέα) from idein (ἰδεῖν), meaning "to see". The term entered the English language by 1743. The term idealism was first used in the abstract metaphysical sense of the "belief that reality is made up only of ideas" by Christian Wolff in 1747. The term re-entered the English language in this abstract sense by 1796. A. C. Ewing gives this influential definition:

the view that there can be no physical objects existing apart from some experience...provided that we regard thinking as part of experience and do not imply by "experience" passivity, and provided we include under experience not only human experience but the so-called "Absolute Experience" or the experience of a God such as Berkeley postulates.

A more recent definition by Willem deVries sees idealism as "roughly, the genus comprises theories that attribute ontological priority to the mental, especially the conceptual or ideational, over the non-mental." As such, idealism entails a rejection of materialism (or physicalism) as well as the rejection of the mind-independent existence of matter (and as such, also entails a rejection of dualism).

There are two main definitions of idealism in contemporary philosophy, depending on whether its thesis is epistemic or metaphysical:

Thus, metaphysical idealism holds that reality itself is non-physical, immaterial, or experiential at its core, while epistemological idealist arguments merely affirm that reality can only be known through ideas and mental structures (without necessarily making metaphysical claims about things in themselves). Because of this, A.C. Ewing argued that instead of thinking about these two categories as forms of idealism proper, we should instead speak of epistemic and metaphysical arguments for idealism.

These two ways of arguing for idealism are sometimes combined together to defend a specific type of idealism (as done by Berkeley), but they may also be defended as independent theses by different thinkers. For example, while F. H. Bradley and McTaggart focused on metaphysical arguments, Josiah Royce, and Brand Blanshard developed epistemological arguments.

Furthermore, one might use epistemic arguments, but remain neutral about the metaphysical nature of things in themselves. This metaphysically neutral position, which is not a form of metaphysical idealism proper, may be associated with figures like Rudolf Carnap, Quine, Donald Davidson, and perhaps even Kant himself (though he is difficult to categorize). The most famous kind of epistemic idealism is associated with Kantianism and transcendental idealism, as well as with the related Neo-Kantian philosophies. Transcendental idealists like Kant affirm epistemic idealistic arguments without committing themselves to whether reality as such, the " thing in itself ", is ultimately mental.
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