Friday, March 2, 2012

Idealism

 Sir James Jeans: "the Universe begins to look 
more like a great thought than like a great machine"


 What else is out there that matters?

Well, we think about matter and anything else using words even if we do not write them down or utter them in some human or not-so-human language of our choice.

If we think without words it is called willing, feeling, sensing and other such mental things.

And as it is not always easy to put toughs into words we may use music or bodily gestures in dance or facial expressions.

A picture may say more than a thousand words - that is plenty of visual talking in one painting or photo!

Cosmologists decipher the secrets of the Universe speaking a special kind of language they detect in it called mathematics.

More formally:

In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. 

Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing.  (From Greek ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē), meaning "knowledge, science", and λόγος (logos), meaning "study of". The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.)

In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas — especially beliefs and values — shape society.

As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit. Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind.

Religious and philosophical thought privileging the immaterial or supernatural over the material and natural is ubiquitous and ancient.

However, the earliest extant arguments that the world of experience is grounded in the mental derive from India and Greece.

The Hindu idealists in India and the Greek Neoplatonists gave pantheistic arguments for an all-pervading consciousness as the ground or true nature of reality.

In contrast, the Yogācāra school, which arose within Mahayana Buddhism in India in the 4th century BC, based its "mind-only" idealism to a greater extent on phenomenological analyses of personal experience. This turn toward the subjective anticipated empiricists such as George Berkeley, who revived idealism in 18th-century Europe by employing sceptical arguments against materialism."
wikipedia

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