Idealists

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If there is a person that would love to give me a concise explanation as to the idealists philosophies, I could really appreciated it.

One can keep it short.

THANKS!
 
Jim_Baur said:
If there is a person that would love to give me a concise explanation as to the idealists philosophies, I could really appreciated it.

One can keep it short.

THANKS!
Click to expand...
I will give it a shot.

The basic idea (forgive the pun) behind idealism is that all of reality exists, not as a physical reality, but inside a mind. It is not that idealists think that the reality is not there, or that it is a figment of our imagination: rather, everything that appears to us to be solid and tangible is, in fact, a construct of our mind (or anyway, of a mind).

So, for example, this computer that I am using, they would say, is a real computer. Unlike those whom they would call the “dogmatists” (i.e., rationalists, such as Descartes, Leibniz, C. Wolff, etc.) and the empiricists (Hume, Locke, etc.), however, they would say that the material appearances—the so-called phenomena, such as color, size, shape, and so on—are entirely in my mind. All of us see the same phenomena, but there is no reality “out there;” everything is appearance, so to speak.

Idealists vary considerably in what they consider this “mind” to be. It could be the individual subject (that is more or less the idea of Fichte and Scheling), or it could be a universal mind, as with Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. Some have tried to “baptize” idealism, making the “mind” the mind of God.

Idealism has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who was not himself exactly an idealist. In his famous Critique of Pure Reason, he attempted in essence to effect a reconciliation of the two main currents of the time: rationalism and empiricism.

Without getting too bogged down in the details, the “dogmatist” (rationalist) philosophers were famous for trying to deduce everything on the basis of self-evident first principles, as if to make a philosophy modeled after Euclid’s geometry.

Their rivals, the empiricists, rejected this approach, saying that we had to start from experience: the knowledge offered to us through our senses. Although Aristotle had said something similar, he had admitted the possibility of knowing things that go beyond experience, through analogy and the analysis of causes. The Empiricists, however, rejected that idea as well: they held, basically, that we could know only what our senses offer us.

That led Hume (the most representative empiricist, in my opinion) to question the reality of two fundamental notions: substance and cause.

Kant was trained as a rationalist, but when he read Hume’s works, he was famously “awakened from his dogmatic slumber”: he could find no answer to refute Hume’s critique of substance and cause. Nevertheless, he realized that without these categories, science (especially Newtonian physics) and mathematics were impossible.

Kant’s solution was to suppose that substance and cause were not “out there,” but constructs of the human understanding. He continued to hold that there was a reality “out there,” which he termed the “noumenon.” However, he argued, we could know nothing about it. The only knowledge about this noumenon we can have is how it appears to us (the “phenomenon”). The “(name removed by moderator)ut” that our senses give us, he argues, are automatically “formatted” by our minds, into his famous twelve categories, of which the most important are substance and cause.

Now, he argues, the “(name removed by moderator)ut” given to us by our senses (a posteriori knowledge) is inherently unreliable. Wherever we have perfectly certain knowledge (“apodeictic” knowledge), it can only be about those things we can know even independently of experience (a priori); that is how he proposes to save physics and mathematics.

Anyway, Kant posited a radical separation between the interior appearance (phenomenon) and the external reality (noumenon) of the world. We could only know the former, never the latter, even though he never rejected the existence of the noumenon.

Idealism basically arose when Kant’s followers began to question to need for the noumenon: if all we can know is the phenomenon, why bother having a noumenon? Couldn’t the phenomenon be all there is? And that is basically idealism’s position: there is nothing but appearance; all is in the mind.
 
Wow!

That was beautiful.

THANKS!

Are you a published author?

Again, thanks!
 
Jim_Baur said:
Wow!

That was beautiful.

THANKS!

Are you a published author?

Again, thanks!
Click to expand...
No, but I did a licentiate (masters) in philosophy. I had some good courses on the development of modern philosophy. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same level of familiarity with phenomenology.

I do know that it began with Edmund Husserl at the turn of the 20th Century, and that he was trying to overcome that dualism that I mentioned between “phenomenon” and “noumenon.” At least toward the beginning of his career, he advocated a “return to the thing in itself” (i.e., noumenon), which would be accomplished by a method called “eidetic reduction.” (If I understood the idea correctly, the idea is to isolate the very essence of a phenomenon be eliminating what is not essential: take the color red for example. By mentally varying its intensity and its shades, I can, says Husserl, come up with what makes redness “red” and eliminate what is nonessential.)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good article on Husserl, which would be a good place to begin. (The Stanford Encyclopedia is an excellent first overview for most areas of philosophy, by the way.)
 
Jim: Great question; you might enjoy lmelahn’s thesis ( academia.edu/7628979/Esse_as_Virtus_Essendi ) owing to your own study of the Summa.

lmelahn: Your answers make such complex things easier to frame in thought.

The DNA Rose: Until you find a “truly good teacher you are willing to submit to”, you will be stuck with Google search and stuck with Google certainty as you are now. (“Google Certainty” means you regard yourself as the judge of the validity of what you read, rather than **submitting **to the Teacher as the definer of validity).
 
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