materialism

Materialism is a family of philosophical doctrines that hold that matter—the physical stuff of the universe and its fundamental fields and forces—constitutes the basic substance of reality. In its core sense, materialism says that every property, event, or process can be explained in terms of physical matter and its interactions. It contrasts with idealism, which treats mind or consciousness as primary, and with dualism, which posits both mental and material substances.

Historically, materialist ideas appear in ancient atomism (Democritus and Epicurus) and recur in later European thought. In the modern era, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi argued for a materialist account of nature. In the 19th century, materialism influenced science, and Karl Marx developed historical materialism, a framework in which material economic conditions and productive forces shape social structure and culture.

In contemporary philosophy of mind, materialism is closely aligned with physicalism, the view that mental states are physical states or functions of the brain. Variants include reductive physicalism, which seeks to explain mental properties in terms of lower-level physical properties, and non-reductive or emergent forms, which claim mental phenomena arise from physical processes but are not reducible to them.

In science more broadly, methodological materialism or scientific materialism treats explanations as grounded in physical causes. Historical materialism emphasizes how material conditions of production influence institutions, politics, and ideology.

Critics argue that materialism struggles to explain subjective experience, consciousness, and intentionality. Respondents include non-reductive physicalists and various alternative frameworks that allow non-physical explanations.