Materialism and Related Topics

Photograph of Marx taken by John Mayall in 1875

Karl Marx

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German philosopher, critic of political economy, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary.

Marx's birthplace, now Brückenstraße 10, in Trier. The family occupied two rooms on the ground floor and three on the first floor. Purchased by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928, it now houses a museum devoted to him.

Friedrich Engels, whom Marx met in 1844; the two became lifelong friends and collaborators.

The first edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in German in 1848

Marx and Engels in the printing house of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. E. Capiro, 1895.

Jenny Carolina and Jenny Laura Marx (1869): all the Marx daughters were named Jenny in honour of their mother, Jenny von Westphalen.

Tomb of Karl Marx, East Highgate Cemetery, London

A monument dedicated to Marx and Engels in Shanghai, China

Outside a factory in Oldham. Marx believed that industrial workers (the proletariat) would rise up around the world.

Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz (known as Karl-Marx-Stadt from 1953 to 1990)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels monument in Marx-Engels Forum, Berlin-Mitte, Germany

Map of countries that declared themselves to be socialist states under the Marxist–Leninist or Maoist definition between 1979 and 1983, which marked the greatest territorial extent of socialist states

This work contains Marx's criticism of materialism (for being contemplative), idealism (for reducing practice to theory), and, overall, philosophy (for putting abstract reality above the physical world).

Detail of Plato in The School of Athens, by Raphael

Idealism

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Indistinguishable and inseparable from human perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas.

The sage Yajnavalkya (possibly 8th century BCE) is one of the earliest exponents of idealism, and is a major figure in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

Statue of Vasubandhu (jp. Seshin), Kōfuku-ji, Nara, Japan.

The 20th-century British scientist Sir James Jeans wrote that "the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine"

In contrast to materialism, idealism asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of phenomena.

René Descartes's illustration of dualism. Inputs are passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Mind–body dualism

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In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable.

Four varieties of dualist causal interaction. The arrows indicate the direction of causations. Mental and physical states are shown in red and blue, respectively.

Another one of Descartes' illustrations. The fire displaces the skin, which pulls a tiny thread, which opens a pore in the ventricle (F) allowing the "animal spirit" to flow through a hollow tube, which inflates the muscle of the leg, causing the foot to withdraw.

Cartesian dualism compared to three forms of monism.

Substance dualism is contrasted with all forms of materialism, but property dualism may be considered a form of emergent materialism or non-reductive physicalism in some sense.

The Greek word αθεοι (atheoi), as it appears in the Epistle to the Ephesians 2:12 on the early 3rd-century Papyrus 46. It is usually translated into English as "[those who are] without God".

Atheism

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Absence of belief in the existence of deities.

Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, an 18th-century advocate of atheism."The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error."

Epicurus is credited with first expounding the problem of evil. David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) cited Epicurus in stating the argument as a series of questions:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

A statue of the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, 1208, Kofukuji Temple, Nara, Japan

Buddhism is sometimes described as nontheistic because of the absence of a creator god, but that can be too simplistic a view.

Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841) would greatly influence philosophers such as Engels, Marx, David Strauss, Nietzsche, and Max Stirner. He considered God to be a human invention and religious activities to be wish-fulfillment. For this he is considered the founding father of modern anthropology of religion.

1929 cover of the USSR League of Militant Atheists magazine, showing the gods of the Abrahamic religions being crushed by the Communist five-year plan

Nonreligious population by country, 2010.

Percentage of people in various European countries who said: "I don't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force." (2010)

Countries with punishment for blasphemy.

Countries with the death penalty for apostasy

Historically, metaphysical monism took the form of philosophical materialism, the view that matter formed the basis of all reality; this naturally omitted the possibility of a non-material divine being.

Charvaka

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Charvaka (चार्वाक; IAST: '), also known as ', is an ancient school of Indian materialism or hedonism.

Atomism

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Natural philosophy proposing that the physical universe is composed of fundamental indivisible components known as atoms.

427 – c. 347 BCE), if he had been familiar with the atomism of Democritus, would have objected to its mechanistic materialism.

A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain

Mind

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Set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena.

René Descartes' illustration of mind–body dualism.
Descartes believed inputs are passed on by the Sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Simplified diagram of Spaun, a 2.5-million-neuron computational model of the brain. (A) The corresponding physical regions and connections of the human brain. (B) The mental architecture of Spaun.

Computer simulation of the branching architecture of the dendrites of pyramidal neurons.

Dualism holds that the mind exists independently of the brain; materialism holds that mental phenomena are identical to neuronal phenomena; and idealism holds that only mental phenomena exist.

Dialectical materialism

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Philosophy of science, history, and nature developed in Europe and based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

In contrast to the conventional Hegelian dialectic of the day, which emphasized the idealist observation that human experience is dependent on the mind's perceptions, Marx developed Marxist dialectics, which emphasized the materialist view that the world of the concrete shapes socioeconomic interactions and that those in turn determine sociopolitical reality.

Dialectic

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Discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned argumentation.

Dialectical materialism, a theory or set of theories produced mainly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted the Hegelian dialectic into arguments regarding traditional materialism.