Materialism Sentence Examples

Metaphysical materialism is the view that everything known is body or matter; but while according to ancient materialists soul is only another body, according to modern materialists mind without soul is only an attribute or function of body.

But Leibnitz's conception of the priority of spirit had too little foundation, and the different elements he sought to combine were too loosely related to one another to stand the strain of the two forces of empiricism and materialism that were opposed to his idealism.

True materialism includes theism.

It might seem, indeed, that Stoicism indicates a falling off from Plato and Aristotle towards materialism, but the ethical dualism, which was the ruling tendency of the Stoa, could not long endure its materialistic physics, and took refuge in the metaphysical dualism of the Platonists.

Objections to the belief in immortality have been advanced from the standpoints of materialism, naturalism, pessimism and pantheism.

This narrow materialism was the true cause of his fatal influence both in church and state.

It is not difficult to discern the influence of naïve materialism in contemporary thinking.

The influence of an advancing study of nature, which was stimulated if not guided by Bacon's writings, is seen in the more careful doctrines of materialism worked out almost simultaneously by Hobbes and Gassendi.

With the two last named he discussed the materialism of Priestley and the theory of necessitarianism.

In view of the results of this analysis, Reid's theory (and the theory of Scottish philosophy generally) has been dubbed natural realism or natural dualism, in contrast to theories like subjective idealism and materialism or to the cosmothetic idealism or hypothetical dualism of the majority of philosophers.

At the same time a class of men arose interested in these forms for their own sake, professional lawyers Bence, but also "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth," and the belief in sacraments such as the Lord's Supper, a piece of religious materialism of which "the necessary consequences are superstition and immorality."

The cause of medical materialism is the natural bias of physicians towards explaining the health and disease of mind by the health and disease of body.

The highest form of the doctrine is scientific materialism, by which term is meant the doctrine so commonly adopted by the physicist, zoologist and biologist.

Anyhow, whatever the method or interpretation is to be, idealism, even more fully than materialism, is pledged to monism and to the rejection of dualism.

A wide missionary activity had begun in the 13th century - an activity which was the product of the Crusades and the contact with the Moslem which they brought, but which yet helped to check the Crusades, substituting as it did peaceful and spiritual conquests of souls for the violence and materialism of even a Holy War.

His book on Materialism and Empiric Criticism (1909) heaps abuse on idealistic philosophers and religious teachers of all schools and creeds.

On the one hand, his whole formulation of Evolution in mechanical terms urges him in the direction of materialism, and he attempts to compose the mind out of homogeneous units of consciousness (or" feeling ")" similar in nature to those which we know as nervous shocks; each of which is the correlative of a rhythmical motion of a material unit or group of such units "(§ 62).

Determinism had other forms besides that of a crude materialism, and the direction that Malebranche succeeded in giving to speculation led only to the more complete denial of freedom and individuality in the all-devouring pantheism of Spinoza.

All these inspiring metaphysical and moral doctrines the pupil accepted from his master's dialogues, and throughout his life adhered to the general spirit of realism without materialism pervading the Platonic philosophy.

But the materialism of modern times is more subtle than that of Hobbes.

The arguments of thorough-going materialism can in most cases be met with a direct negative.

The encouraging thing is there is a whole group of people starting to rise up who are challenging this materialism.

Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and Herbert Spencer are not systematic materialists, but show tendencies towards materialism.

See METAPHYSICS; and Lange's History of Materialism.

If this conception is ".4lecha regarded as full and absolute truth, it involves materialism.

Pantheism does not favour free will or immortality, and may move indefinitely near to materialism.

In his last work Fechner, aged but full of hope, contrasts this joyous "daylight view" of the world with the dead, dreary "night view" of materialism.

Stahl's chief aim was to oppose materialism.

His moral attitude is also far removed from that of ordinary ancient Epicureanism or of modern materialism.

This philosophy, called Empirio-criticism, is not, however, a realistic but an idealistic dualism, nor can it be called materialism.

Lamettrie has been called "the Aristippus of modern materialism."

Without war the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism."

The strength of materialism consists in recognizing nature without explaining it away, its weakness in its utter inability to explain consciousness either in its nature or in its origin.

We shall return, then, to the clearer and more authoritative division, and proceed to discuss materialism, idealism and realism in their order.

Several causes, beginning towards the end of the 18th century, gradually led up to the materialism of Moleschott, Vogt and Buchner, which flourished in the middle of the 19th century.

Meanwhile, philosophic forces to counteract materialism were weak.

These causes, scientific, industrial and philosophical, led to the domination of materialism in the middle of the 19th century in Germany, or rather to its revival; for in its main position, that matter and motion are everything and eternal, it was a repetition of the materialism of the i 8th century in France.

But the new materialism was not mere repetition.

Thus in presence of the problem which is the crux of materialism, the origin of consciousness, he first propounds a gratuitous hypothesis that everything has mind, and then gives up the origin of conscious mind after all.

Curiously enough, he supposes that by making mind a universal attribute of matter he has made his philosophy not materialism, but monism.

Materialists seem to dread the word " materialism."

Buchner also entreats us " to abandon the word ` materialism,' to which (it is not clear why) a.

But if a philosophy makes force an attribute of matter only, as his does, it will recognize nothing but matter possessing force, and will therefore be materialism as well as monism, and in short materialistic monism.

This is materialism.

So Avenarius (q.v.) was no materialist, but only an empiricist anxious to reclaim man's natural view of the world from philosophic incrustations; yet when his Empiriokriticismus ends in nothing but environment, nervous system, and statements dependent on them, without soul, though within experience, he comes near to materialism, as Wundt has remarked.

In France, again, positivism is not materialism, but rather the refusal to frame a metaphysical theory.

Now, when in surrendering theology and metaphysics we have also to surrender God and the soul, we are not free from materialism.

The point of this philosophy is not materialism, but realism.

So far as this main point of transfigured realism is steadily maintained, it is a compound of idealism and realism, but not materialism.

But it is not maintained, on the side either of phenomena or of noumena; and hence its tendency to materialism.

It is true that the author did not see that he was passing from transfigured realism into materialism.

Huxley (1825-1895) developed views very like those of Spencer, and similarly materialistic without being materialism, because inconsistent.

By combining materialism with idealism he made consciousness a product of itself.

In thus endowing all matter with sensation like Haeckel he was not avoiding materialism.

If so, materialism is not the whole truth of metaphysics.

Spinozism, however, though it tramples down the barrier between body and soul, is not yet metaphysical idealism, because it does not reduce extension to thought, but only says that the same substance is at once extended and thinking - a position more akin to materialism.

But, while it differs from both in denying the reality of body, it differs from the former in extending conscious soul not only to plants, as Stahl did, but to all Nature; and it differs from the latter in the different consequences drawn by materialism and idealism from this universal animism.

When the later reaction to Kant arose against both Hegelianism and materialism, the nearly contemporary appearance of Fechner's Psychophysics began to attract experimental psychologists by its real as well as its apparent exactness, and both psychologists and metaphysicians by its novel way of putting the relations between the physical and the psychical in man and in the world.

It died down for a time in the decline of Hegelianism and the rise of materialism.

Lange (q.v.) by his History of Materialism has exercised a profound influence, which is due partly to its apparent success in answering materialism by Kantian arguments, and partly to its ingenious attempt to give.

It is materialistic without being materialism; it is realistic without being realism.

His " empiriocriticism " is idealistic dualism within experience in an a posteriori form, but with a tendency towards materialism.

He develops this belief in an absolute in connexion with his own theory of evolution into something different both from the idealism of Hume and the realism of Hamilton, and rather falling under the head of materialism.

He must ask what are known things, and especially what has been discovered in the sciences; in mechanics, in order to find the essence of bodies which is neglected by idealism; in mental science, in order to understand consciousness which is neglected by materialism.

The chief results we have found against materialism are that bodies evolving account neither for the origin of themselves, their nature, and their fundamental order of resemblance and difference, nor for the nature and origin of consciousness, nor even as yet for their becoming good for conscious beings.

In France, the home of Cartesian realism, after the vicissitudes of sensationalism and materialism, which became connected in French the French mind with the Revolution, the spirit of Descartes revived in the 19th century in the spiritualistic realism of Victor Cousin.

The psychology of Aristotle and Aquinas thus became impossible; for, if the form of a body is only a mode of matter, to call one's soul the form of one's body is to reduce it to only a mode of matter, and fall into materialism.

In 1778 appeared a published correspondence between these two liberal theologians on the subjects of materialism and necessity, wherein Price maintains, in opposition to Priestley, the free agency of man and the unity and immateriality of the human soul.

The various processes of sense, notably vision, are explained on the principles of materialism.

In many most important respects no two men could be more unlike; but, for the present, Carlyle seems to have seen in Goethe a proof that it was possible to reject outworn dogmas without sinking into materialism.

Materialism and low moral principles seemed to him to be gaining the upper hand; and the hope that religion might survive the " old clothes " in which it had been draped seemed to grow fainter.

The materialism of Hobbes, the pantheism of Spinoza, the empiricism of Locke, the determinism of Leibnitz, Collins' necessitarianism, Dodwell's denial of the natural immortality of the soul, rationalistic attacks on Christianity, and the morality of the sensationalists - all these he opposed with a thorough conviction of the truth of the principles which he advocated.

When Berkeley has eliminated the literal materialism of Locke's metaphors of sense-perception, Hume finds no difficulty in accepting the sensations as present virtually in their own right, any nonsensible ground being altogether unknown.

Anaximenes, pupil of Anaximander, seems to have rebelled against the extreme materialism of his master.

This is noticeable in Pomponazzo's system of materialism, based on the interpretation of Aristotle, but revealing a virile spirit of disinterested and unprejudiced research.

He entered the lists boldly against the materialism of " Stoff and Kraft," and avowed himself a Christian believer, whereupon he lost the countenance of a number of his old friends and pupils, and was unfeelingly told that he was suffering from an " atrophy of the brain."

In 1796, when he named his first child David Hartley, but would not have him baptized, he held by the "Christian materialism" of the writer in question, whom in his Religious Musings he terms "wisest of mortal kind."

Other of his innovations, the outcome of his crude materialism, found less favour with his successor, who declined to follow him in identifying the primary substance with fire, or in tracing all vitality to its ultimate source in the sun, the " ruling power " of the world - a curious anticipation of scientific truth.

One inevitable consequence of materialism is that subject and object can no longer be regarded as one in the act of perception, as Plato and Aristotle tended to assume, however imperfectly the assumption was carried out.

On the schism of the Positivist body which followed Comte's death, he was recognized as head of the section which accepted the full Comtian doctrine; the other section adhering to Littre, who rejected the religion of humanity as inconsistent with the materialism of Comte's earlier period.

But as Locke's philosophy became in France sensationalism, and as Locke's pregnant question, reiterated by Collins, how we know that the divine power might not confer thought on matter, led the way to dogmatic materialism, so deism soon gave way to forms of thought more directly and completely subversive of the traditional theology.

He was at issue, however, with the atomistic materialism of Democritus in regard to its twin assumptions of absolute atoms and infinite space.

This view, however, always has been strongly opposed by those who accept on theological grounds a spiritualistic doctrine, or what is, perhaps, more usual, a theory which combines spiritualism and materialism in the doctrine of a composite nature in man, animal as to the body and in some measure as to the mind, spiritual as to the soul.

In two of these (A Letter to a Gentleman in Holland, and Motion essential to Matter), ostensibly an attack on Spinoza, he anticipated some of the speculations of modern materialism.

One of his pamphlets, written about this time, contains his recipe for the promotion of religion, and is of itself a sufficient testimony to the extreme materialism of his views.

Adopting the Kantian standpoint that we can know nothing but phenomena, Lange maintains that neither materialism nor any other metaphysical system has a valid claim to ultimate truth.

For empirical phenomenal knowledge, however, which is all that man can look for, materialism with its exact scientific methods has done most valuable service.

He detaches the Logos idea from its connexion with Stoic materialism and attaches it to a thorough-going Platonism.

Alongside of this harsh materialism Cabanis held another principle.

Of the Welsh Disestablishment measure he said that a meaner bill, or one brought forward by meaner methods, had never been placed before the House; in view of the growth of materialism, he protested against depriving a spiritual organization of its funds.

He regarded the sun as the abode of God, the intelligent providence, or (in accordance with Stoical materialism) the vivifying fire or aether of the universe.

There will never perhaps in any period of the world's history be wanting advocates of materialism, who find in the sensible the only reality.

He argues that Hobbes's atomic materialism involves the conception of an objective physical world, the object not of passive sense that varies from man to man, but of the active intellect that is the same in all; there is therefore, he urges, an inconsistency in refusing to admit a similar exercise of intellect in morals, and an objective world of right and wrong, which the mind by its normal activity clearly apprehends as such.

Agnosticism, Phenomenalism, Rationalism, Materialism all manifest the positivist spirit, denying what may be succinctly described as the metempirical.

I worry a lot about the bling bling bling materialism, the rabid consumerism, that pervades many of our inner-city areas.

I worry a lot about the bling bling materialism, the rabid consumerism, that pervades many of our inner-city areas.

The antidote to black magic is not brute materialism or worldly wisdom.

Mr Dikes implies that universal causality (or randomness) - ie, materialism - equates with coercion.

I don't know whether he understands Marxist dialectics, clearly he understands the language of materialism.

The strength of dualism has been its organizational duality, the strength of materialism its rejection of ontological dualism.

From the 18th century enlightenment to Marxist historical materialism, strong claims have been made in response to these questions.

These are centers where spiritual life has not yet been altogether extinguished by the tyrannical mediocrity of Western materialism.

Well, I'm sorry - but if rejecting materialism means destroying the property of others; then I don't understand.

Some ' monist ' views, often called materialism, think that there is only matter, and no spirit or divine.

His hylomorphism, then, embraces neither reductive materialism nor Platonic dualism.

Rome represented the materialism and decadence of this world.

The current historical phase has been a process of increasing materialism and a simultaneous decrease in spirituality.

Thus dialectical materialism is seen to offer the only approach to reality which can give action a direction.

Consequently, the question of whether a theory change should be ontologically conservative or radical has no clear answer, contrary to eliminative materialism.

This attitude can be seen in someone like Richard Dawkins, arguing from the point of view of radical atheistic materialism.

Some object to the monetary incentives as crass materialism and argue for donors receiving no more than medical expenses and insurance policies.

The pendulum of rampant materialism has now swung too far, correspondingly to be rebuked by new forces of dissent.

Materialism preceded Marxism by more than two thousand years and in the eighteenth century materialism preceded Marxism by more than two thousand years and in the eighteenth century materialism was the standpoint of the rising bourgeoisie.

Her first book was on Sade and materialism (2002 ); she is now working on materialism in the nineteenth century.

Evolution has a foundation in philosophy which is called naturalism or materialism.

Thus, he strived to advance the principle of materialism and deduced a property of ideality from certain aspects of material praxis.

Counting upon the immediate revolutionary effect of Fascist repressions and material privations presents a very good example of vulgar historical materialism.

Society tends to emphasize success, materialism, consumerism, is becoming thoroughly secular.

Published as they were during the years when the modern school of German materialism was at its height,' these works of Lotze were counted among the opposition literature which destroyed the phantom of Hegelian wisdom and vindicated the independent and self-sufficing position of empirical philosophy.

Fichte (the younger) did not escape this misinterpretation of Lotze's true meaning, though they had his Metaphysik and Logik to refer to, though he promised in his Allgemeine Physiologie (1851) to enter in a subsequent work upon the "bounding province between aesthetics and physiology," and though in his Medizinische Psychologie he had distinctly stated that his position was neither the idealism of Hegel nor the realism of Herbart, nor materialism, but that it was the conviction that the essence of everything is the part it plays in the realization of some idea which is in itself valuable, that the sense of an all-pervading mechanism is to be sought in this that it denotes the ways and means by which the highest idea, which we may call the idea of the good, has voluntarily chosen to realize itself.

The real meaning of Lotze's teaching is reached only by patient study, and those who in a larger or narrower sense call themselves his followers will probably feel themselves indebted to him more for the general direction he has given to their thoughts, for the tone he has imparted to their inner life, for the seriousness with which he has taught them to consider even small affairs and practical duties, and for the indestructible confidence with which his philosophy permits them to disregard the materialism of science, the scepticism of shallow culture, the disquieting results of philosophical and historical criticism.

Between modern materialism and hylozoism proper there is, however, the distinction that the ancients, however vaguely, conceived the elemental matter as being in some sense animate if not actually conscious and conative.

Materialism argues that, as life depends on a material organism, thought is a function of the brain, and the soul is but the sum of mental states, to which, according to the theory of psychophysical parallelism, physical changes always correspond; therefore, the dissolution of the body carries with it necessarily the cessation of consciousness.

Naïve materialism is due to a cause which still, perhaps, has no small power, the natural difficulty which persons who have had no philosophic training experience in observing and appreciating the importance of the immaterial facts of consciousness.

It is not difficult to discern the influence of naïve materialism in contemporary thinking.

We see it in Huxley, and still more in Haeckel, whose materialism (which he chooses to term "monism") is evidently conditioned by ignorance of the history and present position of speculation.

It was the great work of Descartes to exclude rigorously from science all explanations which were not scientifically verifiable; and the prevalence of materialism at certain epochs, as in the enlightenment of the 18th century and in the German philosophy of the middle, 9th, were occasioned by special need to vindicate the scientific position, in the former case against the Church, in the latter case against the pseudo-science of the Hegelian dialectic. The chief definite periods of materialism are the pre-Socratic and the post-Aristotelian in Greece, the 18th century in France, and in Germany the, 9th century from about 1850 to 1880.

Vulgar materialism sneers at the problem; duty is a fraud or hobgoblin, a mere superstition.

Flint that while materialism requires sensationalist psychology, yet the psychology in question allows no valid inference to matter, and therefore destroys materialism.

In Das neue Wissen and der neue Glaube (1873) he showed himself as vigorous an opponent of the materialism of Strauss as of the doctrine of papal infallibility.

As far as pure science goes, the inference from science in favour of materialism has visibly lost much of its plausibility, and Protestant apologists would probably be prepared to accept in advance all verified discoveries as belonging to a different region from that of faith.

With these may be mentioned certain volumes of essays, among which are to be noted those upon Historical Materialism and Marxist Economy (1896-1900); upon Hegel (1905); upon Vico (1910); and the New Essays upon Aesthetic (1920), which complete and carry further the first Aesthetic. Croce only took part in the administrative work of Naples upon rare occasions and in moments of crisis.

Not to mention that it has led to another variety, calling itself pluralism, it confuses materialism and idealism.

Finally, there is " The American Way of Life ", or vulgar materialism; not a happy subject.

The alternative lifestyle is marked by a nonchalance regarding materialism.

If you don't want to go through the trouble of creating a gift closet, or you're just fed up with the materialism surrounding the Christmas holiday, you may want to consider making charitable donations as a last minute gift idea.

You find emotional grounding in tradition and security through the lens of materialism.

Critics charge that the dolls encourage materialism and shallow values.

They are also the direct antitheses to the scepticism of Montaigne and Pascal, to the materialism of Gassendi and Hobbes, and to the superstitious anthropomorphism which defaced the reawakening sciences of nature.

It may further be added that materialism can be shown to be an inadequate philosophy in its attempts to account even for the physical universe, for this is inexplicable without the assumption of mind distinct from, and directive of, matter.

Another objection is advanced from the standpoint of naturalism, which, whether it issues in materialism or not, seeks to explain man as but a product of the process of nature.

The various forms into which materialism may be classified correspond to the various causes which induce men to take up materialistic views.

Naïve materialism is due to a cause which still, perhaps, has no small power, the natural difficulty which persons who have had no philosophic training experience in observing and appreciating the importance of the immaterial facts of consciousness.

It may perhaps be fairly said that materialism is at present a necessary methodological postulate of natural-scientific inquiry.

It is a system of empiricism and materialism, remarkable only for teaching free will.

It is a proof of the strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to end culminated not in materialism, but in the boldest idealism.

Philosophy seemed about to end in scepticism or in materialism.

I do not think that we should have anarchy under modern Western materialism.

In anti-religious materialism the motive is hostility to established dogmas which are connected, in the Christian system especially, with certain forms of spiritual doctrine.

In England materialism has been endemic, so to speak, from Hobbes to the present time, and English materialism is more important perhaps than that of any other country.

Wolff's list is of some historical importance - atheism, deism (a God without care for men) and naturalism (denial of supernatural revelation); anthropomorphism (assigning a human body to God); materialism, and idealism (non-existence of matter); paganism (polytheism); Manichaeism, Spinozism, Epicureanism.

He professed the most open materialism, denied immortality in all forms and taught that the soul of man is homogeneous with the soul of animals and plants, material in origin and incapable of separate existence.

His encyclical issued at Easter 1902, and described by himself as a kind of will, was mainly a reiteration of earlier condemnations of the Reformation, and of modern philosophical systems, which for their atheism and materialism he makes responsible for all existing moral and political disorders.

The swellings on the palmar faces of the phalanges of the several fingers are also indicative, the 1st and and of the thumb respectively, of the logical faculty and of the will; the 1st, and and 3rd of the index finger, of materialism, law and order, idealism; those of the middle finger, humanity, system, intelligence; of the ring finger, truth, economy, energy; and of the little finger, goodness, prudence, reflectiveness.

He understood that political materialism, selfishness and corruption in federal administration afford the strongest possible argument for those who advocate strengthening the independent power of the separate states at the expense of nationalism.

Such is Aristotle's theological realism without materialism and the origin of all spiritualistic realism, contained in his Metaphysics (A 6-end).

Materialism supposes that this mechanical order is the real world and the only real world - mechanical monism.'

The extreme materialism of this work excited so much opposition that he was compelled to give up his post at Tubingen.

Haeckel's monism is mere materialism dignified by a higher title.