>>> Chris Doss
I have yet to see a definition of "matter" that made any sense. ^^^^ CB: Of course, as we know, if one really gets into it there isn't a definition of anything that makes sense. Pick your favorite philosophical term that you do think makes sense , and eventually we will show how it falls apart. So, if you go the bad definition route, soon all discourse, philosophical, email list, and otherwise will dissolve into nothing.
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Moreover, in the course of the whole materialism vs. idealism debate, which in my opinion is archaic and wrongly founded from the get-go,
^^^ CB: Archaic ? Like from 1880 or so ? Surely, you don't want to go there, because your favored philosophical issues will be shown to be rooted in some truly archaic, pre-Socratic philosophers.
Why do you think it is "wrongfully" founded ?
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it presupposes a sharp dividing line better "matter" (whatever that is) and "idea" (whatever that is).
^^^^ CB: Actually, as I understand it "there is nothing but matter and motion is its mode of existence". So, ideas are material too. They are matter in a developed form in human life. The point is that ideas are not some non-material thingy. The point of materialism is that there are no ideas independent of matter, there are no ghosts, spirits independent of matter.
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I suppose that most charitably one could describe "matter" as "stuff that exists both in space and time" and ideas as "stuff that exists only in time," and for some reason that is never explained one is supposed to be derivative of the other.
^^^^ CB: You aren't being charitable because it's not the case that you have the valuables and we don't. Ideas are matter, so they exist in time and space also.
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The whole idea that there is a world separate from us with a meaning-as-separate-from-us that we can know while still being attached to it is in my opinion completely incoherent, basically amounting to an attempt to describe what the world would look like if there was nobody looking at it.
^^^^ CB: Yea, Lenin sort of raises this by reference to dinosaurs or species that existed before humans. There was a world before the human species.
Oh, and ideas first came into existence with the human species, symbolic ideas anyway. Dinosaurs have thoughts, but not symbolic thoughts.
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Chris Doss
I do not believe there have even been idealists of the sort Lenin thought he was describing. There has never been a philosopher or philosphical movement that held the belief that nothing exists outside the human mind.
^^^^ CB: The main idealists are theists. Materialism is synonymous with atheism. See Engels's _Socialism:Utopian and Scientific_. The ideas of spirit, God, etc. are ideas of non-material substance. Idealist philosophers sort of slip in and out of it. Philosophers like Hegel are explicitly religious.
On "nothing exists outside the human mind" that is the specific issue of subjective idealism. I'm gonna have to go with Lenin's reading of the subjective idealists over yours. I remember before ever reading Lenin, in Philo 201 Stan Scheinbaum and I used to make jokes about Humean beings and Berkeley abolishing matter because he was constipated. Hume extends his skepticism to the existence of objective reality. Then evidently Mach thinks there are only sense data, that atoms aren't real, but thought aids or something like that. Kant has things-in-themselves existing but not knowable. This gets at the second issue Engels mentions in the chapter "Materialism".
Hegel and Plato are _objective_ idealists ,i.e. everything is an idea.
At any rate, if you don't think there are any idealists, then your statement below doesn't seem to make sense. It would be materialism, not idealism, that is a coherent doctrine. According to you nobody even has an idealist doctrine, let alone a coherent one.
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I personally think that both materialism and idealism are incoherent doctrines, although the latter makes marginally more sense.
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