PHILOSOPHICAL MENTALISM
Definitions
Idealism is a term with several related meanings. It comes via Latin idea from the Ancient Greek idea (ἰδέα) from idein (ἰδεῖν), meaning "to see".
The term entered the English language by 1743.[8][9] It was first used in the abstract metaphysical sense "belief that reality is made up only of ideas" by Christian Wolff in 1747.[7]
The term re-entered the English language in this abstract sense by 1796.[10]
In ordinary language, as when speaking of Woodrow Wilson's political idealism, it generally suggests the priority of ideals, principles, values, and goals over concrete realities.
Idealists are understood to represent the world as it might or should be, unlike pragmatists, who focus on the world as it presently is.
In the arts, similarly, idealism affirms imagination and attempts to realize a mental conception of beauty, a standard of perfection, juxtaposed to aesthetic naturalism and realism.[11][12]
The term idealism is also sometimes used in a sociological sense, which emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society.[13]
Metaphysical idealism is an ontological doctrine that holds that reality itself is incorporeal or experiential at its core.
Beyond this, idealists disagree on which aspects of the mental are more basic.
Platonic idealism affirms that abstractions are more basic to reality than the things we perceive, while subjective idealists and phenomenalists tend to privilege sensory experience over abstract reasoning.
Epistemological idealism is the view that reality can only be known through ideas, that only psychological experience can be apprehended by the mind.[2][14][15]
Subjective idealists like George Berkeley are anti-realists in terms of a mind-independent world.
However, not all idealists restrict the real or the knowable to our immediate subjective experience.
Objective idealists make claims about a transempirical world, but simply deny that this world is essentially divorced from or ontologically prior to the mental.
Thus, Plato affirms an objective and knowable reality transcending our subjective awareness—a rejection of epistemological idealism—but proposes that this reality is grounded in ideal entities, a form of metaphysical idealism.
Nor do all metaphysical idealists agree on the nature of the ideal; for instance, according to Plato, the fundamental entities were non-mental abstract forms.
As a rule, transcendental idealists like Kant affirm idealism's epistemic side without committing themselves to whether reality is ultimately mental; objective idealists like Plato affirm reality's metaphysical basis in the mental or abstract without restricting their epistemology to ordinary experience; and subjective idealists like Berkeley affirm both metaphysical and epistemological idealism.[16]