Idealism

Idealism is the philosophical belief that claims that the world is made up of mental activity (i.e. ideas). Now, the term ‘idea’ is not used in the way that it is used in every-day life, but is rather a catch-all term for that view of idealism that everything that ‘is’, only exists through the mind. There is nothing physical or material, in a sense, and it is not that humans can never know what a thing is (or its essence or substratum) ‘in of itself’ - but rather that there isn’t anything in of itself! It is all human idea, consciousness, and experience shaping the world. However, another form of idealism (sometimes called ‘epistemological idealism’) is the view that there may actually be a world that is independent of human idea, but it is not known to us - since all the mental faculties that are available to humans consist in a subjective and/or ‘unreliable’ (in a philosophical sense) fashion. Thus, for example, you cannot really know what a ‘dog’ is, or if there even is a dog, apart from your ideas and conceptions about one. Nonetheless, the idealist tradition was, and still is, criticized and is opposed by a large number of materialist philosophers. But, the history of idealism is a fundamental part of the field, and left a lasting influence.