Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. (Introduction): Materialism, Opprobrium and the History of Philosophy

   • Charles T. Wolfe

   Pages 1-18

3. To Be Is to Be for the Sake of Something: Aristotle’s Arguments with Materialism

   • Charles T. Wolfe

   Pages 19-33

4. Chance, Necessity and Transformism: Brief Considerations

   • Charles T. Wolfe

   Pages 35-41

5. Early Modern Materialism and the Flesh or, Forms of Materialist Embodiment

   • Charles T. Wolfe

   Pages 43-59

6. Vital Materialism and the Problem of Ethics in the Radical Enlightenment

   • Charles T. Wolfe

   Pages 61-78

7. Naturalization, Localization: A Remark on Brains and the Posterity of the Enlightenment

   • Charles T. Wolfe

   Pages 79-85

8. Materialism in Australia: The Identity Theory in Retrospect

   • Charles T. Wolfe

   Pages 87-108

9. Phantom Limbs and the First-Person Perspective: An Embodied-Materialist Response

   • Charles T. Wolfe

   Pages 109-124

10. Conclusion

    • Charles T. Wolfe

    Pages 125-131

11. Back Matter

    Pages 133-134

    PDF

This book provides an overview of key features of (philosophical) materialism, in historical perspective. It is, thus, a study in the history and philosophy of materialism, with a particular focus on the early modern and Enlightenment periods, leading into the 19th and 20th centuries. For it was in the 18th century that the word was first used by a philosopher (La Mettrie) to refer to himself. Prior to that, ‘materialism’ was a pejorative term, used for wicked thinkers, as a near-synonym to ‘atheist’, ‘Spinozist’ or the delightful ‘Hobbist’. The book provides the different forms of materialism, particularly distinguished into claims about the material nature of the world and about the material nature of the mind, and then focus on materialist approaches to body and embodiment, selfhood, ethics, laws of nature, reductionism and determinism, and overall, its relationship to science. For materialism is often understood as a kind of philosophical facilitator of the sciences, and the authorwant to suggest that is not always the case. Materialism takes on different forms and guises in different historical, ideological and scientific contexts as well, and the author wants to do justice to that diversity. Figures discussed include Lucretius, Hobbes, Gassendi, Spinoza, Toland, Collins, La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach and Priestley; Büchner, Bergson, J.J.C. Smart and D.M. Armstrong.

• Cosmological Thesis
• Determinism
• Historiography of Materialism
• Materialism
• Psychological Thesis
• Radical Enlightenment

“Wolfe successfully detects a historico-philosophical common trait connecting, rather than materialistic theories them­selves, the negative dismissals of materialism, from the first uses of the term in 17th century Cambridge Platonism to contempo­rary philosophy. ... opens new perspectives for both his­torical scholarship and philosophical reflection.” (Paolo Pecere, Rivista di Filosofia, Vol. CVII (3), December, 2016)

“This is a Modernist book, in the literary sense, for richness of ideas and characters, and for boldness of thought and expression. … All this fullness of content and expression makes undoubtedly for an intriguing and instructive reading.” (E. Pasini, Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, Vol. 5 (9), 2016)

• Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

  Charles T. Wolfe

Policies and ethics