Materalism

  In regarding materialism we prefer to let definitions describe how the idea of materialism has morphed through various forms ending with the modern era:
  Webster’s American Dictionary (1828): “The doctrine of materialists; the opinion of those who maintain that the soul of man is not a spiritual substance distinct from matter, but that it is the result or effect or the organization of matter in the body.”
  The Century Dictionary (1893): “1. The denial of the existence in man of an immaterial substance, which alone is conscious, distinct and separable from the body.
  “2. The metaphysical doctrine that matter is the only substance, and that matter and its motions constitute the universe.
  “3. The doctrine that all phenomena are to be accounted for by the fortuitous concourse of atoms, in connection with certain laws or tendencies toward laws, in nature; Epicureanism.
  “4. Any opinion or tendency that is based upon purely material interests; hence, any low view of life; devotion to material things or interests; neglect of spiritual for physical needs and considerations.”
  American Heritage Dictionary (2016): “1. Philosophy: The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.
  “2. The theory or attitude that physical well-being and worldly possessions constitute the greatest good and highest value in life.
  “3. Concern for possessions or material wealth and physical comfort, especially to the exclusion of spiritual or intellectual pursuits.”
  Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary: Materialism was first defined in 1696: as “1a. a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter, scientific materialism;
  1b. a doctrine that the only or the highest values or objectives lie in material well-being and in the furtherance of material progress;
  1c. a doctrine that economic or social change is materially caused;
  2. a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things.
  3. a way of thinking that gives too much importance to material possessions rather than to spiritual or intellectual things.”
  Encyclopedia Britannica: Materialism is, “in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.”
  “Materialism: “a family of metaphysical theories (i.e., theories of the nature of reality) that can best be defined by saying that a theory tends to be called materialist if it is felt sufficiently to resemble a paradigmatic theory that will here be called mechanical materialism.
  “Mechanical materialism denies that immaterial or apparently immaterial things (such as minds) exist or else explains them away as being material things or motions of material things.
  “Dialectical materialism is the orthodox philosophy of communist countries.…their theory is not an extreme materialism, whether mechanical or physicalist.…mental processes are dependent on or have evolved from material ones.

  Types of materialism as distinguished by their account of mind: “A central-state materialist identifies mental processes with processes in the brain. An analytical behaviourist, on the other hand, argues that, in talking about the mind, one is not talking about an actual entity, whether material (e.g., the brain) or immaterial (e.g., the soul); rather, one is somehow talking about the way in which people would behave in various circumstances.
  “Analytical behaviourism differs from psychological behaviourism, which is merely a methodological program to base theories on behavioral evidence and to eschew introspective reports.
  “A materialist in ethical attitude is interested mainly in sensuous pleasures and bodily comforts and hence in the material possessions that bring these about.
  “Modern materialism: The Epicurean tradition was revived in the first half of the 17th century in the atomistic materialism of the French Roman Catholic philosopher Pierre Gassendi was not thoroughgoing in his materialism inasmuch as he accepted on faith the Christian doctrine that people have immortal souls.
  “English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, also propounded an atomistic materialism and was a pioneer in trying to work out a mechanistic and physiological psychology. Holding that sensations are corporeal motions in the brain, Hobbes skirted, rather than solved, the philosophical problems about consciousness that had been raised by another contemporary, the great French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes’s philosophy was dualistic, making a complete split between mind and matter. In his theory of the physical world, however, and especially in his doctrine that animals are automata, Descartes’s own system had a mechanistic side to it that was taken up by 18th-century materialists, such as Julien de La Mettrie, the French physician whose appropriately titled L’Homme machine (1747; Man a Machine, applied Descartes’s view about animals to human beings. Denis Diderot, chief editor of the 18th-century Encyclopédie, supported a broadly materialist outlook by considerations drawn from physiology, embryology, and the study of heredity; and his friend Paul, baron d’Holbach, published his Système de la nature (1770; System of Nature), which expounded a deterministic type of materialism in the light of evidence from contemporary science, reducing everything to matter and to the energy inherent in matter. He also propounded a hedonistic ethics as well as an uncompromising atheism, which provoked a reply even from the Deist Voltaire.
  The 18th-century French materialists had been reacting against orthodox Christianity. In the early part of the 19th century, however, certain writers in Germany—usually with a biological or medical background—reacted against a different orthodoxy, the Hegelian and Neo-Hegelian tradition in philosophy—named for the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Among these were Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt.
  Materialist ways of thinking were later strengthened enormously by the Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which not only showed the continuity between humans and other living things back to the simplest organisms but also showed how the apparent evidences of design in natural history could be explained on a purely causal basis.

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