10 Facts About Subjective idealism

Subjective idealism, or empirical idealism, is a form of philosophical monism that holds that only minds and mental contents exist.

Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism; indeed, it is the contrary of eliminative materialism, the doctrine that all or some classes of mental phenomena do not exist, but are sheer illusions.

Subjective idealism is a fusion of phenomenalism or empiricism, which confers special status upon the immediately perceived, with idealism, which confers special status upon the mental.

Subjective idealism thus identifies its mental reality with the world of ordinary experience, and does not comment on whether this reality is "divine" in some way as pantheism does, nor comment on whether this reality is a fundamentally unified whole as does absolute idealism.

Subjective idealism made its mark in Europe in the 18th-century writings of George Berkeley, who argued that the idea of mind-independent reality is incoherent, concluding that the world consists of the minds of humans and of God.

Related searches

Subjective idealism's view was that there are different types of reality.

Subjective idealism explains this with his cave analogy which contains people tied up only seeing shadows their whole life.

Subjective idealism says “if there were external bodies, we couldn't possibly come to know this; and if there weren't, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now”: “a thinking being might, without the help of external bodies, be affected with the same series of sensations or ideas as you have.

Subjective idealism is featured prominently in the Norwegian novel Sophie's World, in which "Sophie's world" exists in fact only in the pages of a book.

Parable of subjective idealism can be found in Jorge Luis Borges' short story Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which specifically mentions Berkeley.