Materialism

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This article is about the philosophy of scientific materialism. See Related Articles subpage for links to articles about other types of materialism.


In ancient Greece, some 2500 years before 20th-century science discovered the subatomic world; the quantum world with its characteristic indeterminancy and uncertainty; chaos; emergence; and the full flowering of the world of fields, materialism—often called scientific materialism—served as a worldview, attributing to matter the status as the underlying constituent of nature, conceiving matter, in one version, as material particles, indivisible, in motion in a void, the interactions of the particles dictated by necessities external to the particles themselves, the interactions determining the shape, size, weight, and motion of all objects in the natural world (Anastopoulos 2008). That idea, called atomism, emerged from the minds of Leucippus (5th century BCE) (Berryman 2010), Democritus (b. ca. 460 BCE) (Berryman 2010), and Epicurus (341-270 BCE) (Konstan 2009).

The Materialism of Epicurus (c. 341-271 BCE)
…the whole of being consists of bodies and space. For the existence of bodies is everywhere attested by sense itself, and it is upon sensation that reason must rely when it attempts to infer the unknown from the known. And if there were no space (which we call also void and place and intangible nature), bodies would have nothing in which to be and through which to move, as they are plainly seen to move. Beyond bodies and space there is nothing which by mental apprehension or on its analogy we can conceive to exist. When we speak of bodies and space, both are regarded as wholes or separate things, not as the properties or accidents of separate things.
…the first beginnings must be indivisible, corporeal entities.
…the atoms, which have no void in them—out of which composite bodies arise and into which they are dissolved—vary indefinitely in their shapes; for so many varieties of things as we see could never have arisen out of a recurrence of a definite number of the same shapes. The like atoms of each shape are absolutely infinite; but the variety of shapes, though indefinitely large, is not absolutely infinite…
The atoms are in continual motion through all eternity. Some of them rebound to a considerable distance from each other, while others merely oscillate in one place when they chance to have got entangled or to be enclosed by a mass of other atoms shaped for entangling….
Moreover, there is an infinite number of worlds, some like this world, others unlike it…
… For the atoms out of which a world might arise, or by which a world might be formed, have not all been expended on one world or a finite number of worlds, whether like or unlike this one. Hence there will be nothing to hinder an infinity of worlds.
—Letter to Herodotus

Other ancient Greek materialists, in particular, Empedocles (490-430 BCE) (Parry 2008), imagined matter as elements, or elementary substances, such as earth (solid), air (gaseous), water (fluid), and fire (heat), substances distinguished by their qualities, qualities evident to sense experience, substances interacting through properties inherent to the substances themselves, specifically love (attraction) and strife (repulsion), whose consequences generated and decomposed all the objects of sense experience, clay and trees, sun, moon, and stars (Anastopoulos 2008; Curd 2008).

From earliest times, then, materialism did not subscribe to a particular theory of matter. But in all theories, something less unquestionably material than matter was in the picture—e.g., void, forces.

Thus, materialism originated with the ancient Greek atomists and elementists of the 7th to 5th centuries BCE. Subsequently it flourished as the scientific paradigm for explaining the nature of the universe for three centuries following the time of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newtonian and post-Newtonian materialism excluded any explanations of reality that could not be reduced to the physics of the time, whether the fundamental components required to account for the interactions or qualities of matter themselves qualified as material —as remains the case today among 21st century scientific materialists.

Materialism denied supernaturalism, in that it denied that material-independent spiritual or divine powers ever account for observable events in the natural world. It denied mind as independent of, or fundamentally different from the body, an entity of interacting material substances. Such classical materialism held that natural interactions of matter always explain events, even in instances where lack of knowledge precluded explanation (Joad 2005).

Materialism affirmed determinism, in that it asserted that all events of the world result from preceding ones — embracing causality — and it asserted that knowledge of the state of the world at any given time can in principle enable prediction of the state of the world at a future time.

Definitions of materialism

Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006) gives this definition of materialism:

Materialism is the name given to a family of doctrines concerning the nature of the world that give to matter a primary position and accord to mind (or spirit) a secondary, dependent reality or even none at all. Extreme materialism asserts that the real world is spatiotemporal and consists of material things and nothing else, with two important qualifications: first, space and time, or space-time, must also be included if these are realities rather than mere systems of relations, for they are not material things in any straightforward sense. Second, materialism is fundamentally a doctrine concerning the character of the concrete natural world we inhabit, and it is probably best to set to one side controversies over abstract entities such as numbers, or geometric figures, or the relations of entailment and contradiction studied in logic.

Note that the Macmillan encyclopedia's definition includes space and time as fundamental constituents of the world, even though "they are not material things in any straightforward sense".

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998) defines materialism:

Materialism is the genera! theory that the ultimate constituents of reality are material or physical bodies, elements or processes. It is a form of monism in that it holds that everything in existence is reducible to what is material or physical in nature. It is opposed to dualistic theories which claim that body and mind are distinct, and directly antithetical to a philosophical idealism that denies the existence of matter. It is hostile to abstract objects, if these are viewed as more than just a manner of speaking...

Note that the Routledge encyclopedia's definition includes the word "processes", in a context that implies "processes" as "material or physical in nature".

In their anthology, Moser and Trout (1995) introduce their concept of contemporary materialism:

Materialism, of the kind accepted by many philosophers and scientists, is a general view about what actually exists. Put bluntly, the view is just this: Everything that actually exists is material, or physical. This general view originated with western philosophy itself, among the pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece. Many philosophers and scientists now use the terms "material" and "physical" interchangeably; we shall follow suit. (Likewise, we shall use "materialism" and "physicalism" interchangeably.) Understood as a general position about what exists, materialism is an ontological or a metaphysical, view. Characterized thus, it is not just an epistemological view about how we know, or just a semantic view about the meaning of terms. What however, is the exact meaning of "material," or "physical"? In the absence of an answer to this question, materialism will be an obscure ontological view. It will then be difficult, if not impossible, to confirm or to disconfirm materialism (Moser and Trout 1995).

Boyd et al. (1991), in the glossary of their Philosophy of Science, define materialism:

Materialism: The ontological doctrine that states that everything that exists is, or depends on, matter.

As originally formulated, materialism is a philosophy of mechanism and determinism in respect of workings of the natural world, the world as essentially a machine, a 'clockwork universe'.

Outmoded paradigm

Philosopher Jessica Wilson emphasizes that materialism, as originally formulated, is no longer a viable philosophy (Wilson 2006):

Materialism, roughly formulated, is the thesis that all broadly scientific entities are nothing over and above material entities, where the latter are characterized as being extended, impenetrable, conserved, such as to (only) deterministically interact, and so on. The material entities ultimately supposed to serve as an ontological basis for all else are those existing at relatively low orders of constitutional complexity – entities that are, as I’ll put it, ‘‘relatively fundamental’’. But contemporary physics has reported that the relatively fundamental entities have few, if any, of the characteristics of the material; and thus materialism has been rendered a has-been (Wilson 2006)

Physicists and science popularizers agree, proclaiming "Materialism is dead" (Davies and Gribbin 1992, 2007):

An extension of the quantum theory, known as quantum field theory…paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. In this theory, little distinction remains between material substance and apparently empty space, which itself seethes with ephemeral quantum activity. The culmination of these ideas is the so-called superstring theory, which seeks to unite space, time and matter, and to build all of them from the vibrations of submicroscopic loops of invisible string inhabiting a ten-dimensional imaginary universe.

...scientists are increasingly thinking of the physical Universe less as a collection of cogs in a machine and more as an information-processing system. Gone are the clodlike lumps of matter, to be replaced instead by "bits" of information. This is the shape of the emerging universe paradigm—a complex system in which mind, intelligence and information are more important than the hardware.

Philosopher Alexander Rosenberg (2005) echos those views, speaking to materialism's deterministic aspect:

Between them, Newton and Darwin are the great sources of philosophical materialism or physicalism, which undermines so much traditional philosophical theory in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and for that matter may threaten moral philosophy...But, twentieth-century developments in physics and the foundations of mathematics have shaken the confidence of philosophical materialism far more than any merely philosophical arguments. First, the attempt to extend deterministic physical theory from observable phenomena to unobservable processes came up against the appearance of sub-atomic indeterminism in nature. It has turned out that at the level of quantum processes - the behavior of electrons, protons, neutrons, the photons of which light is composed, alpha, beta and gamma radiation - there are no exceptionless laws, the laws seem to be ineliminably indeterministic.

Relation to 'physicalism'

...in progress

Contemporary materialism

The dominant form of contemporary materialism is functionalism. This has two components. the first is to focus on causality: what causes "mental states" and what causal effects they have. The second is to identify these "mental states" as phenomena of the central nervous system.

References

  • Berryman, Sylvia. (2010) "Leucippus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
  • Berryman, Sylvia. (2010) "Democritus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
  • Curd, Patricia. (2008) "Presocratic Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
  • Epicurus (341-270 BCE). Letter to Herodotus. From: Epicurus & Epicurean Philosophy.
    • From website: Epicurus's philosophy combines a physics based on an atomistic materialism with a rational hedonistic ethics that emphasizes moderation of desires and cultivation of friendships. His world-view is an optimistic one that stresses that philosophy can liberate one from fears of death and the supernatural, and can teach us how to find happiness in almost any situation. His practical insights into human psychology, as well as his science-friendly world-view, gives Epicureanism great contemporary signficance as well as a venerable role in the intellectual development of Western Civilization.
  • Joad CEM. (1936, 1950) Guide to Philosophy. London: V. Gollancz, ltd. | Google Books preview 1950 ed.
    • Excerpt: We know too much about the physical world to-day, to feel that we know anything for certain. Certainly we do not know enough about it to justify us in asserting that it possesses those characteristics which it must possess, if it is to act as a foundation for the imposing superstructure of a materialist universe.
  • Konstan, David, "Epicurus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
  • Parry, Richard. (2008) "Empedocles", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).



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