The satisfactions of subjectivity: a defense of idealism.
Abstract
What is the nature of reality? What makes something “real”? This is one of the
fundamental questions of philosophy, and realism and idealism have long stood as two
diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive answers to one species of that question.
Realism takes reality to be ultimately self-existent and independent of our minds,
experience, and beliefs. Idealism, on the other hand, sees reality as intimately related to
and dependent on the mental, such that it is not separate from our experience or
cognition. Yet realism has always had the advantage of seeming to accord with our
everyday experience and our practical orientation toward the world, which is most often
one of naïve realism. And so it has often been the case that idealism has had to defend
itself against and justify itself to realism, which has regularly been taken to be the
“common sense” worldview. In this thesis, I challenge this entrenched realism, and
provide a defense of idealism. I examine, critique, and defend, in turn, the idealisms of
Berkeley, Kant, and Peirce, finding in each an important step on the road to my own
account of idealism. I do so in the context of the aforementioned question, what makes
something “real”? What is “the real”? Realism says that “the real” is that which exists
independently of us and our cognition. However, I argue that the concepts of the “mindindependent”
and the “thing-in-itself” upon which realism depends are either logically
incoherent or empty of meaningful content. Ultimately, I contend that the caricature of
idealism as the view that tells us that “all is within the mind” must be overcome, and
suggest that a form of neo-Hegelian idealism can both account for the ideality of reality
while leaving room for a world that is, in a important sense, independent of us.
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