Skip to content
EntityQ247218· pop 30· linked from 450 articles

subjective idealism

Sign in to save

philosophy that only minds and ideas are real

~14 min read

Encyclopedic overview

George Berkeley is credited with the development of subjective idealism.

Subjective idealism, or empirical idealism or immaterialism, is a form of ontological monism that holds that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism; it is the contrary of eliminative materialism, the doctrine that all or some classes of mental phenomena (such as emotions, beliefs, or desires) do not exist, but are sheer illusions.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “subjective idealism” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.