(75) Insofar as Berkeley is concerned with the advantages that accrue to
immaterialism with respect to religion, it is reasonable to see this as primarily a religious concept of God, that each of its component concepts expresses veneration for the divine, and that each of the component concepts is acceptably imprecise.
Eriugena's intellectualist
immaterialism: is it an idealism?".
Another possibility, one to become increasing popular in the 18th century, was what we might think of as the materialist converse of Berkeley's
immaterialism. If Berkeleian
immaterialism results from eliminating the material side of Descartes' dualism, a materialist approach to the mind results from eliminating the immaterial side.
Perhaps the most obvious sense in which Kant was an idealist was in his opposition to the 'reality' of time and space, (7) an opposition which has been interpreted by many as suggesting a version of Bekeley's
immaterialism. The picture motivating this interpretation is, I suggest, something like the following.
BRILLIANT 18th-century philosopher shook world with theory of
immaterialism. Theory claims eveything around us is generated by consciousness.
The Principles is a subtly developed argument for his central theory, and the Dialogues is a lively and imaginative presentation of the opposing views of materialism (represented by Hylas) and Berkeley's metaphysical idealism or
immaterialism (represented by Philonous).
True enough, sociologists currently interested in technology privilege information machines and indulge in a rhetoric of
immaterialism and dematerialization.
His high-minded
immaterialism, however, is a time bomb, for at 40 he has already spent nearly his entire paternal legacy on the books and is drifting unawares into pennilessness.
McCulloch's leading thought is that "vanishingly little is settled when
immaterialism is rejected" (p.
The contention that "things" -- material objects -- are "ideas" -- conceptions of the mind -- is the logical inference to be drawn from Berkeley's basic premise that esse is percipi.(17) This philosophy of
immaterialism, which treats matter (the external objective reality) as spirit (mental perception), approached from the other end provides Hazlitt with a rationale whereby spirit (the forms of the imagination) assumes a material character.
Johnson sought to refute Berkeley's
immaterialism by charging it with denying that there are rocks in the world.