Lapaz Mark
Lapaz Mark
Lapaz Mark
This is the
period which immediately follows primitive times. This period of primitivity is also called the
period of the Vedas, because the Vedas, the oldest religious poems of ancient India, afford
the best reflection of this period. The time in which materialism made its appearance is
called the epic period of India, because then the great popular epics, the Mahabharata and
the Ramayana, emerged. It was a time of great religious and philosophical agitation;
Buddhism then made its appearance as the new world religion and with it an allied religious
reform called Jainism. It was thus a time of profound crisis for ancient religious views, a
crisis for the ancient religion which bore the name Brahmanism. The members of the
ancient priestly caste of India were called Brahmans. It was a time of broad mass
movements against the authority of this Brahman caste and against the religious views on
which the authority of the Brahmans rested.
. Idealism
Idealism is the doctrine that ideas, or thought, make up either the whole or an
indispensable aspect of any full reality, so that a world of material objects containing
no thought either could not exist as it is experienced, or would not be fully "real."
Idealism is often contrasted with materialism, both belonging to the class of monist
as opposed to dualist or pluralist ontologies. (Note that this contrast between
idealism and materialism has to do with the question of the nature of reality as such
— it has nothing to do with advocating high moral standards, or the like.) Subjective
Idealists and Phenomenalists (such as George Berkeley) hold that minds and their
experiences constitute existence. Transcendental Idealists (such as Immanuel Kant)
argue from the nature of knowledge to the nature of the objects of knowledge--
without suggesting that those objects are composed of ideas or located in the
knower's mind. Objective Idealists hold either that there is ultimately only one
perceiver, who is identical with what is perceived (this is the doctrine of Josiah Royce),
or that thought makes possible the highest degree of self-determination and thus the
highest degree of reality (this is G.W.F. Hegel's Absolute Idealism). Panpsychists (such
as Leibniz) hold that all objects of experience are also subjects. That is, plants and
minerals have subjective experiences--though very different from the consciousness
of animals.
The approach to idealism by Western philosophers has been different from that of
Eastern thinkers. In much of Western thought (though not in such major Western
thinkers as Plato and Hegel) the ideal relates to direct knowledge of subjective
mental ideas, or images. It is then usually juxtaposed with realism in which the
real is said to have absolute existence prior to and independent of our knowledge.
Epistemological idealists (such as Kant) might insist that the only things which can
be directly known for certain are ideas. In Eastern thought, as reflected in Hindu
idealism, the concept of idealism takes on the meaning of higher consciousness,
essentially the living consciousness of an all-pervading God, as the basis of all
phenomena. A type of Asian idealism is Buddhist idealism.
[edit] History
expansion.
[edit] Antiphon
In his chief work Truth, Antiphon wrote: "Time is a thought or a measure, not a
substance". This presents time as an ideational, internal, mental operation, rather
than a real, external object.
[edit] Plato
Main article: Platonic idealism
However, even if Plato doesn't share the specific concerns of modern philosophy,
and of George Berkeley, in particular, Plato could still be a non-subjective idealist.
He could believe that matter has no independent existence, or that full "reality"
(as distinct from mere existence) is achieved only through thought. Bernard
Williams and Myles Burnyeat have maintained that Greek philosophers never
conceived of idealism as an option, because they lacked Descartes's conception of
an independently existing mind.[2] But Williams and Burnyeat didn't consider the
possibility that Plato could have held an idealism like Kant's, which argues from
the nature of knowledge to the nature of the objects of knowledge, or like Hegel's,
which denies that matter is fully "real"--without (in either case) reducing material
objects to ideas in a mind or minds.
The German Neo-Kantian scholar, Paul Natorp, argued in his Plato's Theory of
Ideas. An Introduction to Idealism (first published in 1903)[3] that Plato was a non-
subjective, "transcendental" idealist, somewhat like Kant, and Natorp's thesis has
received support from some recent scholars.
Criticism of Idealism
In the 1st edition (1781) of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant described Idealism as
such.
We are perfectly justified in maintaining that only what is within ourselves can be
immediately and directly perceived, and that only my own existence can be the
object of a mere perception. Thus the existence of a real object outside me can
never be given immediately and directly in perception, but can only be added in
thought to the perception, which is a modification of the internal sense, and thus
inferred as its external cause … . In the true sense of the word, therefore, I can
never perceive external things, but I can only infer their existence from my own
internal perception, regarding the perception as an effect of something external
that must be the proximate cause … . It must not be supposed, therefore, that an
idealist is someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses; all
he does is to deny that they are known by immediate and direct perception … .
Gassendi, Pierre
1981 Institutio Logica (1658): a critical edition with translation and introduction.
Howard Jones, ed. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum.
“About my imotion”