Philosophical materialism

Abstract

Critical philosophical position, which considers matter as the beginning, origin and cause of everything that exists. The term was first used in 1647 by Robert Boyle and was adopted by the philosophes of the Enlightenment in the 18th century to designate their naturalistic position in physics and physiology, their radical criticism of religion, their hedonistic morality, and their opposition to the educational and moral conventions of the Old Regime. Classical philosophical materialism suffered the effects of Kant's criticism and idealism throughout the 19th century, as evidenced in Germany by the so-called «dispute of materialism» (Materialismusstreit), which led to the consolidation of different varieties of materialism: physicalist, phenomenalist, moral, historical, dialectical, etc. It is impossible to account for the theoretical varieties of materialism, which have multiplied in the 20^th century as our scientific knowledge of matter and the universe has been refined. However, the originary and inderivable character of matter has been associated since Antiquity with cosmological atomism. Since atoms are no longer «indivisible» and do not figure as the last components of reality, materialism takes on a more methodological aspect and in all its varieties underlines the ontological primacy of matter over spirit and the priority of scientific knowledge over other types of knowledge: religious, mystical or extrasensory.