Blackwell Reference Online

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In its broadest sense, materialism contends that whatever exists just is, or at least depends upon, matter. (In its more general form it claims that all reality is essentially material; in its more specific form, that human reality is.) In the Marxist tradition, materialism has normally been of the weaker non-reductive kind. Materialism may be regarded as a ‘holding operation’, against forms of idealism, asserting the existence of abstract entities such as universals (unless identified as the properties of material things), supernatural beings or minds (unless identified with, or at least rooted in, bodily processes); and against explanations which invoke such entities. Materialists thus exclude the possibility of disembodied existence and are metaphysically oriented against dualism. In this article I will first consider materialism in the realm of the philosophy of mind, before turning to Marxist materialism. Opposing classical Cartesianism, early and mid-twentieth-century B ehaviourism argued that mind consists in outer acts or even movements. In the third quarter of the century it became clear that behaviourism traded, to say the least, on a confusion between meaning and empirical grounds. The dominant form of materialism, the central state materialism (CSM) advocated by D. Armstrong, U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart, involved three steps: (a) the analysis of prima facie mental ... log in or subscribe to read full text