(Bertrand Russell in 1957. Credit: Anefo, Wikipedia) The tenets of idealism have been questioned time and time again since its emergence, and the criticisms leveled at it are as varied as are the different forms of idealism. In England, the … Read More
Thomas Nagel The philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel, although long associated with a form of epistemological dualism concerning the body-mind relationship (the “dual aspect theory”), introduced himself in a book by 2012 as an idealist, in direct opposition to materialism … Read More
Schelling and the “philosophy of identity” (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.) At the very end of the 18th century, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, a young German philosopher claiming to be first of Fichte, wrote a series of works which influenced … Read More
Berkeley’s immaterialism (John Locke, whose empiricism strongly influenced the thinking of George Berkeley.) During the first half of the 18th century, the Irish philosopher, theologian and bishop George Berkeley developed a radical but influential idealist conception, later called “subjective idealism”, … Read More
Plato and the theory of Ideas (Platonic allegory of the Line, describing all the major epistemological (left) and ontological (right) divisions between the sensible and the intelligible. ) Plato is, in the fourth century BC, the first European philosopher to … Read More
One can distinguish during the modern period preceding Kant two antagonistic forms of idealism: a rationalist idealism and an empiricist idealism. The first, oriented towards the concepts of reason, developed essentially between the middle of the 17th century, after René … Read More
(For simplicity, Plato’s idealism is often contrasted with Aristotle’s alleged empiricism, as evidenced by the gesture of each of the two philosophers in this detail of a fresco by Raphael.) In 1702, the German philosopher Leibniz coined the term idealism … Read More
In philosophy, idealism is the position that all reality boils down to determinations of the mind, whether these are “ideas”, mental representations or more subjective determinations such as “sensory experiences” or the feelings. Theoretical position on the nature of the … Read More
German idealism is the generic name given to a set of philosophies developed in Germany at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Its main representatives are: Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), … Read More
(Neoclassical aesthetics is a paradigmatic example of idealistic art: The Oath of the Horatii, by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) .) The idealism in art is an artistic approach that seeks faithful representation of reality (mimesis), to equal the artistic realism; but … Read More
