Idealism

Metaphysical idealism holds that physical facts supervene on mental facts, making the mental the fundamental feature of reality. This contrasts with physicalism, which claims the opposite. Idealism is a monist view that does not reduce consciousness to something more basic or identify it with brain states. The chapter argues that idealism is a more attractive position than typically recognized in contemporary philosophy of mind.

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Abstract

Metaphysical idealism is the mirror-image of physicalism about the mental: where physicalists contend that the mental facts of our world supervene on the physical facts (but not vice versa), idealists contend that the physical facts of our world supervene on the mental facts (but not vice versa). Like physicalism, idealism is a kind of monism. According to idealists, the fundamental features of our world (or at least its fundamental contingent features) are all of one kind—the mental kind. Unlike physicalists, however, idealists try to achieve monism without reducing consciousness to something ostensibly more basic, or identifying consciousness with something that we previously didn’t realize was consciousness (like brain states). This chapter attempts to defend idealism as a more attractive position than is often thought in current philosophy of mind.