Philosophy - Idealism

Idealism

Idealism - the universe is the embodiment of mind; reality is of the nature of mind; ultimate reality as an entity transcending phenomena.

Metaphysical Idealism - a system which emphasises the analysis of the entire universe as a psychic reality, postulating an ideal element permeating all things, and philosophies depicting ultimate reality as consisting of consciousness, mind or personality.

Epistemological Idealism - system which emphasises the identification of reality with the “mentally knowable” data, the perceptible truths.

Platonic Idealism - ultimate reality consists of ideal constructs which are real.

Personalism - essentially American, originated in the works of George Howison and Borden Parker Baone, “the doctrine that the ultimate reality of the world is a Divine Person who sustains the universe by a continuous act of creative will”

- the conception of human personality as the key to reality, stating that the ontologically real is personality: “life is deeper than logic”

empirical coherence is the criterion of truth.

Epistemological dualists = the knower and his ideas are distinct from the object of his knowledge.

Absolute Idealism - the view of reality as the embodiment of the mind

Thomas Hill Green (1836-1882) - Hegelianized Kantian thought, doctrine of relations (the reality of any object depends exclusively upon its relations to other objects).

self-consciousness - “the quality in a subject of being consciously an object to itself”

Francis Herbert Bradley (1864-1924) - British, fondness for paradox and contradiction, philosophy was a means of obtaining intellectual satisfaction through discovery of ultimate truth.

- the self is the sum of its experiences; “the real, to be real, must be felt”

- defined reality as the Absolute; appearance is fragmentary, relational, changing; reality must be understood by combining appearances with awareness of the whole reality in our experience; the ethical goal is fulfilment of the self.

Josiah Royce (1855-1916) - American, posited a real world “of outer and ideal truth, a world of mind,” the Absolute is an all-embracing and overruling spiritual Being.

- unless there were Absolute Truth, there could be no error.

- the very denial of truth constitutes an admission that truth exists

- since error exists, there must be truth from which it errs; and since there is truth, there must be a mind which possesses conscious knowledge of it  eg. God

- consciousness is knowledge aware of itself; since only ideas are knowable, then that which is absolutely unknowable cannot possibly exist.

supreme good (loyalty) - “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause”