Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Institute of Philosophy
- Code
- BMI-FILD-322.03
- Title
- Metaphysics: Subjective Idealism
- Usual semester
- Spring
- ECTS
- 4
- Language
- Description
- Subjective idealism -- usually associated with Berkeley and Leibniz, but also found in Buddhist philosophy -- is the view that the physical world is not real: fundamentally, only our (immaterial) minds exist. (Berkeley's term for this theory was "immaterialism".) Since its inception, subjective idealism has been unrelentingly unpopular and philosophers almost universally reject it today. To counter this trend, this course seeks to show that subjective idealism is a perfectly coherent, unrefuted view, arguments for which are roughly as strong as the arguments for the reality of the physical world. After an overview of its historical forms, the course will discuss arguments for and against subjective idealism in contemporary analytic philosophy and it will link these debates to contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science.