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(2016) Materialism, Dordrecht, Springer.
Materialism – the philosophical doctrine that "Everything that exists, is material", including human beings, who cannot then have an immortal soul – has been a heretical or clandestine teaching since the beginnings of philosophy. Its main crime is "explaining the higher level in terms of the lower level," as Auguste Comte put it; this in turn is supposed to lead straight to immoralism: even Darwin denied that he was a materialist! At the same time, materialism is said to be the position which somehow facilitated and prepared the advent of modern science, particularly physical and biological science. What then is materialism? Is there only one, or are there many variants? I will mainly examine the first sustained materialist school in modern philosophy, in eighteenth-century French thought, chiefly represented by La Mettrie and Diderot, but also other figures notably in England. In addition, I will draw some contrasts between "French materialism" and contemporary philosophy of mind, in which the dominant question is the relation between mind and brain.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24820-2_1
Full citation:
Wolfe, C. (2016). Materialism, opprobrium and the history of philosophy, in Materialism, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 1-18.
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