The principal aims of this book are to provide the reader with an introduction to the history of the philosophical doctrine of materialism and to outline the elements of contemporary materialism, now known, for reasons explained in the text, as ‘physicalism’. The references provided serve as a guide to further reading for those readers who wish to pursue both these areas in greater depth. The book has been written with the non-specialist reader in mind, but it is also intended to be of interest to those working in both philosophy and the history of ideas.
The chapters are of quite different kinds. Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the basic ideas at the heart of materialist philosophy. Relations to rival and kindred philosophical traditions are discussed.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 cover the historical development of materialism from the first millennium bce up to the conclusion of the nineteenth century ce. A short summary of such a huge topic is necessarily very selective, but the material chosen gives a general overview of the intellectual climate of the relevant period, and describes the place of materialist thought in that setting. An account is given of the work and influence of key philosophers who have a significant place in the history of materialism.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 contain the core philosophical ideas and theses of contemporary materialism, and are the most demanding. They explain the concept of supervenience, which has a central place in contemporary physicalist thought, and discuss its far-reaching implications.
Chapter 8 is the concluding chapter. It considers the place of physicalism in the contemporary philosophical scene and in modern society at large. As may be evident, materialism is a philosophical doctrine that is not and cannot be confined to academic cloisters.
It may seem foolhardy to write a brief introductory book for the general reader in a field as contentious as philosophy. The authors are likely to be admonished for partiality, selectivity, over-simplification and subjective bias, and are likely to be guilty as charged, to a greater or lesser extent. Nonetheless, in the case of materialism it is important to undertake this task because, of all topics in epistemology and metaphysics, which together lie at the heart of philosophy, it is one of the most significant for people who otherwise have little or no interest in philosophy.
Ideas about what kind of stuff the world is made of have always been at the forefront of human thought, in some form or other, and few if any philosophical theories have aroused as much passion. The wars of religion in Europe that followed the Reformation may have had their origins in disputes about money-making by the Church, but denying the doctrine of the Trinity or that of Transubstantiation – both of which are purely metaphysical doctrines – became illegal. At different times and in different societies there has been extraordinary intolerance for some answers to ontological questions – those concerned with the issue of what sort of stuff exists. Even today there are several countries where it is a capital offence to have certain beliefs about the nature of the world, and about what kinds of things there are.
There are two interconnected strands to the history of materialism; there is the intellectual development and exposition of the philosophical claim, and there are the lives of materialist thinkers and philosophers who, while not materialists themselves, have played a key part in the development of materialism. This book discusses both. It is somewhat partisan in being admiring of the great thinkers in the materialist tradition, which includes one of the greatest poets of the ancient world, Lucretius. This admiration is partly for the ideas, but it is at least as much for the stance these thinkers have taken in the intellectual, social and political world they inhabited.
Prior to the twentieth century, materialist thinkers were in the vanguard of the cause of tolerance and free thinking. For reasons that will become clear, a certain kind of materialism became part of the foundational metaphysics of what has come to be known as the Radical Enlightenment, the great achievement of the Western intellectual tradition (Israel 2002). In the twentieth century everything changed; materialism became untethered from the Enlightenment tradition and, for the first time in history, regimes promoting a materialist ideology achieved state power. Materialism became associated with mass incarceration and murder. This shows, if further evidence were needed, that a theory about what the world is like has no necessary connection with the question of how human beings should behave.
We would like to thank Andrew Pyle and Jan Westerhoff for their very helpful comments on Part I of the book. We also thank the readers appointed by Routledge for their thoughtful and insightful reports. Finally, we would like to thank Tony Bruce at Routledge for his encouragement and enthusiasm in the process of bring this book to publication.