idealism

Idealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical idealism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality or truth is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest type of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered "real". Because there are different types of idealism, it is difficult to define the term uniformly.

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Idealism is a philosophical view that reality, at its core, is fundamentally mental or spiritual in nature—existing as mind, consciousness, or ideas—rather than being independent physical matter. It matters because it challenges how we understand the nature of reality itself and offers a contrasting perspective to the common assumption that the physical world exists independently of human thought.

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Commons category: Idealism

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Contents

Definitions
Types of ontological idealism
Classical Greek idealism
Pre-Socratic philosophy
Platonism and neoplatonism
Idealism in Judaism and Christianity
Idealism in Eastern philosophy
Hindu philosophy
Advaita
Other idealist schools
Buddhist philosophy
Vasubandhu
The Buddhist epistemologists
Chinese philosophy
Modern philosophy
Subjective idealism
Epistemic idealism
Kant's Transcendental idealism
Neo-Kantianism
German idealism
Schopenhauer's philosophy
Gentile's actual idealism
Anglo-American Idealism
British absolute idealism
American idealism
Pluralistic idealism
Personalism
Contemporary idealism
Analytic idealism
Idealistic theories based on 20th-century science
Criticism
See also
Notes
References
Primary
Other
External links

Indian philosophy contains some of the first defenses of idealism, such as in Vedanta and in Shaiva Pratyabhijña thought. These systems of thought argue for an all-pervading consciousness as the true nature and ground of reality. Idealism is also found in some streams of Mahayana Buddhism, such as in the Yogācāra school, which argued for a "mind-only" (cittamatra) philosophy on an analysis of subjective experience. In the West, idealism traces its roots back to Plato in ancient Greece, who proposed that absolute, unchanging, timeless ideas constitute the highest form of reality: Platonic idealism. This was revived and transformed in the early modern period by Immanuel Kant's arguments that our knowledge of reality is completely based on mental structures: transcendental idealism.