IDEALISM: Defined and Explained
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- Опубліковано 20 чер 2024
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What is Idealism? This philosophy video provides a clear definition of Idealism and explains what does and doesn't count as Idealism under that definition. This task is important because there is confusion concerning whether specific metaphysical views held by past and contemporary philosophers qualify, especially the contentious case of Immanuel Kant who held a position he termed 'Transcendental Idealism'.
This is an introductory video into Idealism that clears the way for detailed and specific discussions of the view from a historical and contemporary perspective in other videos.
#Idealism #Definition #Explained
---------Video Contents---------
0:00 - Introduction
0:08 - The Definition
0:46 - A Controversy
1:36 - Ontological Idealism
2:04 - Epistemological Idealism
2:51 - The Real Idealism
3:50 - Ending
---------Channel Details---------
This channel features videos about big ideas in philosophy, explained as simply as I can. The focus is on late 19th and early 20th century thought, with a particular emphasis on the British Idealists (e.g. F. H. Bradley, J. M. E. McTaggart) and early analytic philosophers (Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Ramsey). Welcome to the channel!
---------My Details---------
I am a PhD student and Gates Scholar at Cambridge near the end of a thesis on Frege's views on Truth. I have lectured at Cambridge on Frank Ramsey and Bertrand Russell, regularly taught undergraduate logic classes, and have also supervised students in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, epistemology, and early analytic philosophy. But I have a keen interest in the British Idealists that I hope to pursue by making videos about what I'm reading, so much of the content of this channel will be an outlet for that interest.
---------References---------
Guyer, Paul and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, "Idealism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
It is weirdly difficult to get a straight forward defintion of Idealism. So this is great!
Happy to help!
Another quality video, came here from Frege to subscribe and impressed. I like the distinction between ontological and epistemic idealism and certainly helps to clarify why I never really viewed Kant as an idealist.
Thanks a lot for the comment. I'm working on a Russell video at the moment and hope to be more frequent once I get on top of my thesis so stick around 😊
Very underrated channel. As someone from a different but similar background (computer science), these videos help me bridge the gaps in my knowledge. Thanks a lot.
Thanks for the encouragement! Glad to help.
everything is a belief or interpretation
I have met several people who naturally gravitate to this way of thinking. It's been a perplexing experience for me, in childhood I was more skeptical, and later became a non skeptical realist. Idealists strike me as detached and specious in their reasoning. These videos help me to understand people who think differently, and to ask the questions they ask, thank you.
Ma Sha Allah your comment is too good I invite you to accept the right religion Islam so that you will success in this world and here after thankyou.❤
Stick around. When I get more time I'd like to do more videos on idealism as I find it very convincing.
Yeah. I've been more on the side of idealism for most of my life and looking back it astonishes me how much of it was what people call the "philosopher's disease" and what Jacobi called nihilism(the first use of the word, btw. It was a criticism of a particularly extreme form of idealism). Pretty much a detachment from phisicality(I think people may feel that for diverse reasons. I used to have these very intense absence episodes when I was young, where my mind would kinda go on a hyperactive state. But also just the intense virtualization of life we're experiencing today is already a reason for that) and a escapist wish for transcendence(this one is more wishful thinking than anything else, but it isn't hard to find reason why people want some kind of transcendence).
Still, I wouldn't throw idealist ideas completely on the garbage, even if it is not true.
For one, idealists have an insistence on needing to investigate the world by themselves and have developed some pretty good tools for that. The carthesian method for example.
Another is how it may not really explains the world, but does express a very predominant part of human psychology. This tendence for spiritualism, to not feel like just a body. I could go on an unending quest on how little brainquirks of mine and my overall lifestory lead me on this way. When I was young being an idealist was being a skepticist, but a skepticist of the physical.
Of, course it's a balance. Fof example, lately I've been turning more and more to a form anti-transcendentalist. Just as a form of trying to combat some ideas that I find rampant and foolish like Manifestation and cheap for sale spiritualism.
@@ghfudrs93uuu Agreed. I associate idealistic outlooks with spirituality and transcendent concepts. Every idealist I've met showcases high levels of intrinsic religiosity. I was raised in a religious household, but didn't understand it very well so I pretended to "get" it for most of my life without truly understanding it at all. I understand it much better now at 26 than I did at 6.
I have a hard time following idealistic reasoning. They're usually sincere and mean well, but people like this seem unable to track causality. One of my close friends is very idealistic and we don't agree on much, he seems almost solipsistic to me. He thinks metaphysical ideas are as real/more real than external reality. I tried to pin down his reasoning several times with a series of questions. I realized it is all based on his emotions and he is skeptical of external reality (refuses to apply coherence theory of truth to his theology, only correspondence theory). He is moreso inclined to question evolution, gravity, the laws of physics than his God.
On reflection I now think that idealism is important to function (we need to believe in transcendent ideas like love, hope, compassion to achieve anything) and it has caused people to reinvent the wheel while examining reality, but holding to a religious ideological framework seems to invariably lead to compartmentalization and circular reasoning.
Bizarrely, I loved Pollyanna as a girl, and I just finished reading Voltaire's Candide. I understand the criticisms and concerns, but I think the mindset afforded by Leibnizian optimism is valuable and can work from a naturalistic, realistic framework just as it does for an idealistic framework. It's what I aim for.
Great explanation! Your voice is so nice to listen to
Glad to discover channel & shall view more links.
An amazing intro to the different strands of idealism is Bryan Magee's book on Schopenhauer. The chapters on idealism and the great tradition are seriously amazing. Magee was also a novelist and he could communicate like a master. And the second best is probably Schopenhauer's short essay on idealism.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah - I’m going to hunt this book down too! Cheers!
Great video Nathan. You explain complex ideas in a concise and understandable way. Despite the high quality of comment you are attracting (notwithstanding some of the silly interpersonal warfare comments that are not relevant to your video) and the knowledge that I am unable to comment at such a rarefied and specialist level, I think that your videos cleverly target both the more informed and the beginners such as myself - and for that I am grateful - Thanks, and looking forward to more of the same, including the educated and informed debate that it generates.
Thanks Alden! Another coming this week
I Kant get my head around this...ha! Anyways, keep on your quest to enlighten the You Tube universe, your explanations are clear and concise....and really quite excellent. Cheers!
Thanks for the encouragement!
Very good video quality. I understand this is an introductory video, but I think it's important not to conflate transcendental idealism wholesale with epistemological idealism (not saying you meant to do that, but it can come across as that in the video). For anyone in the comments who may not know, "transcendental" refers to transcendental philosophy, which examines the necessary conditions for the possibility of empirical cognition, and Kant is a transcendental _idealist_ because he locates these necessary conditions in the nature/structure of the mind and mental activity. So this is quite different from epistemological idealism, even if it happens to coincide with Kant's views (which I think is questionable in itself because there are many different ways of viewing Kant, but I digress).
Thanks for the comment. I'm no Kant expert so am happy to be corrected. My understanding is that (according to Kant) the phenomenal world is mentally constructed and since this world must be the basis of our empirical knowledge, at least knowledge of empirical facts must be mental in nature. But on reflection, I'm not sure on the status of a priori synthetic knowledge. Especially the transcendental claims Kant makes. So perhaps Kant doesn't even fully qualify as an epistemological Idealist. Thoughts? But what seems clear to me is that he doesn't qualify as an ontological Idealist since things in themselves are not mentally constructed, and he gives us no reason to think they are mental objects either.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Kant certainly doesn't qualify as an ontological idealist. From my limited understanding, it isn't so much that Kant is a representationalist in the epistemological idealist sense, but rather, in his attempt to synthesize rationalism and empiricism (among other things), he comes to the conclusion that thoughts without content are empty and intuition without concepts is blind, and so the subject's conceptual schema and intuition are tied up with each other such that intuition supplies thoughts with their content (thoughts without content are empty) and the subject's conceptual schema is what forms the content of intuition to make that content intelligible or _conceptual_ (intuition without concepts is blind), so it is in this sense that the objects of empirical cognition are "mentally constructed," because we cannot know such objects apart from our conceptual schema which forms the content of intuition. Such objects apart from our conceptual schema would be the noumena, which provide intuition with the content that the conceptual schema forms to be the intelligible world of phenomena that we experience, and since the world we know is the world of post-formed intuition, the world in itself (noumenon) which provides the content to intuition is pre-formed which is why for Kant it is unknowable.
So to call this view "representationalism" in the standard sense I think is a mistake, but again this comes from my very limited understanding of Kant so I'm not entirely sure.
@@TheBrunarr What you say sounds right to me. I didn't call Kant a 'representationalist', I said his view is of an epistemological Idealism kind. Perhaps that's not correct, it would probably depend on further specifying epistemological idealism. What is the case, though, is that those that introduce the distinction between epistemological and ontological idealism do so by defining it roughly as I have here. And they also do so partly to include Kant, who clearly does not fall under Ontological Idealism, under the Idealism tent.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Oh, I didn't mean to imply that you called him a representationalist strictly, just that epistemological idealism is usually representationalist, and there's a kind of allusion to it at 2:28. There's definitely a lot of vagueness around Kant in virtue of the many ways to interpret him so I, like you, are not making definitive claims either way, only what I think is the case so far in my research.
Anyway, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what other videos you have in store.
@@TheBrunarr Working on it! :)
Very good, however, the man whose been championing Idealism strongly for the past 10 years is Bernardo Kastrup and he holds to Analytical Idealism as I am in touch with him maybe, I can facilitate a video interview/discussion between you both. As a Clinical Hypnotherapist I am more aware than most that words are spells:
1: "Analytic Idealism is a theory of the nature of reality that maintains that the
universe is experiential in essence. That does not mean that reality is in your or
our individual minds alone, but instead in a spatially unbound, transpersonal
field of subjectivity of which we are segments." Kastrup
1: Phenomenalistic idealism claims that the physical world is logically created. by
the organization of (i.e. the regularities in and lawlike constraints on) hu- man
sense-experience. As such, it contrasts with, and falls between, two. other
ontological positions.
2: Phenomenal idealism is the metaphysics which deduces that, as we begin by
perceiving nothing but mental phenomena of sense, so all we know at last from
these data is also phenomena of sense, actual or possible. So far it is in general
agreement not only with Hume, but also with Kant in his first two positions
At the age of 6, I knew that Idealism was correct at 61, I have seen nothing to change my mind.
Yes I would be very interested in talking to Kastrup. I have been following him a bit online but haven't read his books. I think he is better known to general audiences than in the academic community, and I suspect the terms you used to distinguish kinds of Idealism above are his. Out of interest, do you know if he uses the term 'Analytic Idealism' because he associates his position with the position put forward by AC Ewing? Or has he simply reused the term (knowingly or not)? Perhaps I could just ask him :).
Great video! Thank you. I just have a quick question. According to your definition of ontological idealism, Kant seems to be an ontological idealist since "existence" is one of the categories and the categories only apply to the phenomena. But you say that Kant is not an ontological idealist.
Good point. But really the definition of ontological idealism I put forward is meant to be a general one, and not one to be understood within a particular philosopher's system. Kant treats 'existence' in a particular way, but the definition of ontological idealism is meant to be understood as a metaphysical position about the nature of what is. Since Kant thinks there are things-in-themselves that may not be mind dependent, I don't think he counts as an ontological idealist. PS Thanks for the membership!
It's refreshing to see a straightforward and accurate explanation of idealism without falsely equating it with solipsism. I'm definitely looking forward to watching your next video on how idealism competes against its rivals.
Thanks for the comment and sub. I saw your channel pop up recently and was intrigued. I actually came across Monistic/Absolute Idealism (as a metaphysical view) when I started postgrad research on Schaffer's Priority Monism and Horgan and Potrc's Blobjectivism. I found them both too lightweight for my tastes. They lean heavily on mereology and vagueness, wrapped up in Quinean ontology. Bradley seemed like he had a much more comprehensive position. Not sure on your take on this, or what you think of Schaffer's work.
Oh and I agree there are some shocking definitions of Idealism on UA-cam. Especially some of the high view ones. But the next video I'm doing is not really an analysis of the relative strengths of the positions, but one that defines their boundaries and differences. I am comparing Idealism (as a view) with its rivals, not seeing how it competes with them. That will come later.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy You're welcome, thanks for making videos on such a great topic. I admire Schaffer's revitalizing of monism and I appreciate his critiques of pluralism and existence monism. However, I think his materialism holds him back and may be partly why he may be "too lightweight" as you put it. Idealism in general seems to be so much more inclusive and flexible which is what allows for those like Bradley to make such a comprehensive ontology as opposed to materialists like Schaffer. Would you say that you are an absolute idealist? Would you say you are a personal idealist?
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Okay I see, thanks for clearing that up. The next video sounds very interesting.
@@MonisticIdealism Yes, I'm pleased Schaffer has brought the idea back into debate in analytic philosophy. My dissatisfaction with his view centres around his modelling of it, that perhaps derives from materialist assumptions. He has a standard first order logic with a domain of objects, and then introduces two fundamental (non-logical) relations: a parthood relation and a dependence relation. The debate then devolves into two questions. Do we accept such relations 'exist' between objects, and which way do they 'point'? So he manages to take what seems to me a foundational metaphysical question and manages to turn into something rather minor. 'Tacked on' monism I call it. It hardly lives up to its bill as being one of the primary disagreements that leads to the emergence of analytic philosophy. I don't think the standard first order logic assumptions are the proper domain of the debate. It is not coincidental that the British Idealists had their own ideas about logic, and would not (I think) consent to the object property distinction assumed in first-order semantics. And the idea that monism was a matter of a primitive dependence relation would cause Bradley to spin in his grave!
Thank You! I have been bombarded by an individual claiming idealism which before your video was absolute gibberish to me. I can get behind the epistemological idealism, but that as far as I can go.
Understandable. But many arguments for ontological Idealism begin with epistemological Idealism and then argue that since the mental is all that can be known we are unjustified in believing there is anything other than the mental, since we could never know it. Depends how convincing you think that second step is.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy I would accept that such an argument had a point IF there weren't evidence of what is denoted as the physical effecting the mind. (Consider our parade of recreational drugs...)
The point being that our cognitive tapestries are a map to the territory that we denote as reality; and we are in that territory and are effected by that territory.
Thus to claim that the territory is the same as the map would seem to be a major error of categorization.
British idealism for long dismissed, covers a range of varieties, difficult to understand, which Nathan explains well, look forward to any book written by him.
Thanks for the compliment. I'm looking forward to reading them more systematically. And who knows? Maybe that will give me the material for a good book. I agree their thinking ought to be more read.
What if you can never have certainty about the nature of reality, but you make idealistic decisions based on the knowledge you have. In other words, you never know for sure if you are correct, but you believe that there is a correct answer to all questions.
Love from India
Two questions.
Are postmodernists epistemological idealists?
How materialism and realism are related, are those two the same thing, or those two concepts are just overlapping?
Hmmm, good question. I'm not that familiar with postmodernism, and the little I know suggests there is a lot of movement in the positions. But I can see why there could be a connection if the idea is that the subject is involved in all knowledge.
As for materialism and realism, again the terms can be slippery, but I would say they are different. A materialist would be a realist, but a realist might not be a materialist. The materialist says that everything is or depends on the material, while the realist says that everything is or depends on something outside our mind. The realist, then, might believe there are abstract (or just non-material) objects like numbers, Platonic forms, God etc. And that these objects do not depends on matter.
For example, if you watch my video on Frege's Sense and Reference, you will see he believes in non-material objects. But although it is a controversial topic, the main position of Frege scholars is that he is a realist even so.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Thanks
I am really having trouble understanding this.
one being the rejection of the material world,
I can precive objects by means of my five senses ,
but where are the characteristic anchored in?
I think I am missing something ,could you help?
Another is ,what is spirit ,in context to idealism?
And what of actual idealism?
The idealist would point out that you can perceive with your five senses, but you cannot know that you perceive *objects* with them, let alone know what the nature of those objects are, e.g. material etc. There is no reason why those senses need 'anchoring' as you put it. And if they are 'anchored' there are reasons to think they are 'anchored' in mind.
Spirit is, I believe, what Hegel thinks the Absolute consists of. I am not sure of his conception of spirit and how close it is to the conception other idealists might have of mind. At this point it is best to take each idealist and see how they argue reality should be conceived.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy When I say "anchoring" I mean where do the characteristics of something I perceive derive from ,what do they originate from?
Let me say there is a tree ,a unique tree. I can touch ,see ,smell ,taste & smell the unique characteristic of that tree that stands out. And when I ceass to live ,someone else perceves or observes the same characteristics of the unique tree I do. These characteristics exist independently from the perceivers ,(or Mabye they don't)
,so where do these characteristics come from ,what are they 'anchored' in? Could they be 'anchored' in a independent external world ,a material world?
How would they be 'anchored' in the mind ,if the mind is finite? Wouldn't an answer to that would be God?
@@HansMcc1984 I will try to answer from the idealist position: Everyone who comes along and experiences the tree with their senses cannot access "the object in itself", that is to say the only way that humans perceive is through the mind itself, not the object, just a representation of the senses in the mind. As for the permanence of objects, if someone is an absolute monist, the tree remains because it is still part of the absolute, it persists in its form longer than the humans did for others to come along and experience the representation, not the object in itself.
Wise upon current state of affairs in Philosophy! Thank you very much. Move on if you dare
Do we know that we cannot know anything about ultimate reality?
Keep them coming. It starts slow but one day it will explode for you and you want to be ready when it does. You will reach 350k Subscribers then it will be hard to grow beyond that.
If you run a dataset on all UA-cam Channels it will show this pattern. Don't expect much after 350k subscribers. SAVE UR MONEY. Don't get fooled and invest. Never allow UA-cam to ever be Ur sole income, ur videos will suffer.
Ma Sha Allah bhai I invite you to accept the right religion Islam so that you will success in this world and here after thankyou sir.❤
I am confused.
Let me say there is a tree ,a unique tree. I can touch ,see ,smell ,taste & smell the unique characteristic of that tree that stands out. And when I ceass to live ,someone else perceves or observes the same characteristics of the unique tree I do. These characteristics exist independently from the perceivers ,(or Mabye they don't)
,so where do these characteristics come from ,what do they originate from? Could they be resonate in a independent external world ,a material world?
We perceive the characteristics of objects ,but where do they come from?
It is very hard in language not to talk about characteristics *of* things. But the idealist will probably reject the assumption that the characteristics you perceive are characteristics *of* something. They are just characteristics you experience and you have no reason to assume there is some underlying thing (say, the unique tree) that 'owns' those characteristics. You can see, touch, taste, and smell in a tree-like way, but you don't know that you are seeing, touching and tasting *a tree*.
Okay, so then you ask where those characteristics come from. Here there are options. Perhaps they don't 'come from' anywhere, but are mere sense data that are public to perceivers. Perhaps they come from some absolute mind or consciousness, perhaps they come from your own mind, maybe your subconscious, or perhaps they come from an independent material world. Each of the options I have mentioned (except for one!) would account for the public nature of those experiences, but present a different view of the nature of reality, and all could account for our perceptions.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Thank You.
It seems to me, that there is neither a mental nor a physical world. There are things that we are labeling as mental or physical but there is nothing that makes it physical or mental in themselves. It is not a natural kind but just a arbitrary category in which we put things and properties. That what is actually mental or physical is just our vocabulary and not the world.
There is also something that bugs me about the epistemological idealist. Correct me if I am wrong, but I assume here that they mean the external world with ultimate reality. If we can know nothing about the content of the external world, then how can we even know of its existence? Why even put an external world forward as an explanation of our sense experience if it is just a black box? We could also put forward as an alternative, that sense experience causes other sense experiences. So the reason why you can see the chair again if you are looking again at it is because there are some small bits of information in you past sense experience which memorized the chair and caused it to appear again. Of curse this is solipsism but it is as good as an explanation as the black box reality of the epistemological idealist.
What also bugs me about the black box reality, that if true, then I can not know that other people exist in an external world. So maybe they only exist inside my sense experience. This is of curse quite solipsistic in itself but this is what would follow from a black box reality view.
You have some good thinking there. Kant's idea of the thing in itself was rejected by the neo-Kantians as superfluous. The question then comes down to the basis of truth and how to account for error in your theory.
Could epistemological idealists be dualists?
Since epistemological idealism can be wedded to any view of the nature of things in themselves, I don't see why an epistemological idealist couldn't be a dualist. At least, it doesn't seem to be inconsistent. But I don't know how they couldn't justify it.
Thanks, mate. Evidently, the UA-cam gods fated me to discover your channel. I may stop by now and again.
Fantastic! See you around then 😊
depending on the mental to exist at all and depending on the mind to be perceived are entirely different classes of dependence.
the former makes the world contingent on the mental. the latter makes the mental contingent on the world.
one is congruent with reality the other is nonsensical.
How is epistemological idealism consistent with the non-idealistic views of reality? Excuse my slow-processing brain and English is not my first language. I hope to enlighten my perspective more since I have read a few of Marx's compositions. By non-idealist view, I hope you mean the materialist view.
Epistemological Idealism says that the objects of knowledge are mental in nature. Perhaps we know only thoughts (for example) or facts, where facts are understood to be constructed by our minds. But that does not mean there might not be a reality independent of how we, as humans, know of it. A reality that would exist even if there were no minds, and thus be mind-independent. One option is to think that the real world is material, but that is not the only option. Perhaps there are also minds, spirits, or souls in reality. Or perhaps there are abstract objects like numbers too. These kind of things are not usually considered to be material.
*So Idealism is "Vedanta" and it's two divisions are just "Advaita Vedanta" and "Dvaita Vedanta".
Maybe. I don't know Eastern religion enough to comment.
Idealism is generally defined as pure quackery.
Do you literally just scour youtube for videos on idealism in your free time? lmao
@@TheBrunarr
Wow! Of course not. I was checking "my boy" Monistic Idealism's channel to see if he's released a new video yet since it's been two weeks already, and this video is on two of his playlists. I see you appear to have gotten over that intellectual drubbing I gave you in my last video to you. Apparently you got taken to the woodshed so bad, it made you give me the cold-shoulder for a long time.
You shouldn't have taken that intellectual drubbing so personally. I've taken on so many people and defeated so many over 3 decades on this platform, if I were a white male endowed with glorious white privilege enjoyed by people like TimCast, PewDiePie, Thunderf00t, Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson, I would be a legend renowned for my reason, intellectual purity and intellectual bandwidth.👍
@@someoneelse7351
Thanks for the insult person I've never interacted with my entire life.😄
What about my videos are low quality? They're rendered in 1080p!
@@Dhorpatanstill as ego bloated as ever I see, dunning Kruger at its finest, and still drinking the race kool-aid. I didn't ban you from my channel because of an intellectual dispute, I banned you because of the lack of it. All you did is make negative comments and insults and a complete failure to understand the content of the last video of mine you commented on, nothing constructive whatsoever, including cussing out pessimistic idealism which youtube actually held for review and didn't publish, so I was the only one to see. You were a hindrance, not a contribution, and I acted accordingly. I just pray you change your ways.
@@someoneelse7351
*"it wasn’t an insult but a criticism and me pointing out why you don’t have a popular channel"*
Insults and criticism are NOT mutually exclusive. In fact I struggle to think of criticism that is not an insult, since criticism in this context is censure or condemnation.
Ridiculous.
Great explanation! Your voice is so nice to listen to