Knowra Idealism Idealism Idealism is a family of philosophical views that treat mind, experience, or ideas as fundamental to reality or to its intelligibility. Its forms differ over whether reality depends on minds or is known through them.
Metaphysics : The branch of philosophy that studies reality’s most general features and constituents. Idealism makes a metaphysical claim about what is fundamental.
Subjective idealism : The view that objects exist only insofar as they are perceived by minds. It makes dependence on perception the defining feature of one idealist position.
Plato : An ancient Greek philosopher whose dialogues examine forms, knowledge, justice, and the good. His account of Forms supplied a lasting model for treating intelligible realities as more fundamental than sensible things.
Esse est percipi : Berkeley’s principle that sensible things exist by being perceived. It states the dependence of sensible objects on perception in its most concise form.
German idealism : A late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical movement associated with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It gathered influential post-Kantian systems that developed idealist themes in different directions.
Epistemology : The branch of philosophy that studies knowledge, justification, and the limits of knowing. Some idealisms concern how reality can be known rather than what exists independently.
Objective idealism : The view that reality is fundamentally intelligible or mind-like, but not dependent on any individual mind. It preserves an idealist account of reality while rejecting dependence on private perception.
George Berkeley : An Irish philosopher who argued that sensible objects exist as ideas perceived by minds. His immaterialism is a major early modern form of subjective idealism.
Kantian categories : The a priori concepts, including causality and substance, that Kant says organize human experience. They explain how the mind contributes structure to experienced reality.
Phenomenology : A philosophical movement that investigates the structures of experience as they appear to consciousness. Its focus on experience inherited questions idealism raised about mind’s role in knowing reality.
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