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In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society. As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit.〔 Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind. The earliest extant arguments that the world of experience is grounded in the mental derive from India and Greece. The Hindu idealists in India and the Greek Neoplatonists gave panentheistic arguments for an all-pervading consciousness as the ground or true nature of reality.〔 In contrast, the Yogācāra school, which arose within Mahayana Buddhism in India in the 4th century CE,〔Zim, Robert (1995). ''Basic ideas of ''Yogācāra'' Buddhism.'' San Francisco State University. Source: () (Retrieved 18 October 2007).〕 based its "mind-only" idealism to a greater extent on phenomenological analyses of personal experience. This turn toward the subjective anticipated empiricists such as George Berkeley, who revived idealism in 18th-century Europe by employing skeptical arguments against materialism. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, German idealists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer dominated 19th-century philosophy. This tradition, which emphasized the mental or "ideal" character of all phenomena, gave birth to idealistic and subjectivist schools ranging from British idealism to phenomenalism to existentialism. The historical influence of this branch of idealism remains central even to the schools that rejected its metaphysical assumptions, such as Marxism, pragmatism and positivism. ==Definitions== ''Idealism'' is a term with several related meanings. It comes via ''idea'' from the Greek ''idein'' (ἰδεῖν), meaning "to see". The term entered the English language by 1743.〔()〕 In ordinary use, 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.〔(Dictionary.com )〕〔(Merriam-Webster )〕 Any philosophy that assigns crucial importance to the ideal or spiritual realm in its account of human existence may be termed "idealist". 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.〔Daniel Sommer Robinson, ("Idealism" ), ''Encyclopædia Britannica''〕〔In ''On The Freedom of the Will'', Schopenhauer noted the ambiguity of the word ''idealism'', calling it a "term with multiple meanings". For Schopenhauer, idealists seek to account for the relationship between our ideas and external reality, rather than for the nature of reality as such. Non-Kantian idealists, on the other hand, theorized about mental aspects of the reality underlying phenomena.〕〔Philip J. Neujahr would "restrict the idealist label to theories which hold that the world, or its material aspects, are dependent upon the specifically cognitive activities of the mind or Mind in perceiving or thinking about (or 'experiencing') the object of its awareness." Philip J. Neujahr, ''Kant's Idealism'', Ch. 1〕 Subjective idealists like George Berkeley are anti-realists in terms of a mind-independent world, whereas transcendental idealists like Immanuel Kant are strong skeptics of such a world, affirming epistemological and not metaphysical idealism. Thus Kant defines ''idealism'' as "the assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining".〔Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 318, ISBN 0-521-55248-6〕 He claimed that, according to ''idealism'', "the reality of external objects does not admit of strict proof. On the contrary, however, the reality of the object of our internal sense (of myself and state) is clear immediately through consciousness." 〔''Critique of Pure Reason'', A 38〕 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 and Gottfried Leibniz affirm an objective and knowable reality transcending our subjective awareness—a rejection of epistemological idealism—but propose 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 Plato, the fundamental entities were non-mental abstract forms, while for Leibniz they were proto-mental and concrete monads.〔Mark Kulstad and Laurence Carlin, "Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind", ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/〕 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Idealism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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