Materialism

Materialism is the philosophical doctrine according to which matter is primary in nature: everything that exists, including thought and consciousness, arises from material processes and depends on them. It is a form of ontological monism, since it holds that there is only one fundamental kind of substance.

Materialism emerged independently in several regions of Eurasia in antiquity. In India, the Cārvāka school held that the world was made of four elements and that consciousness disappears with the body. In Greece, Democritus and Epicurus explained all change as the combination and motion of atoms in the void. In early modern times, thinkers such as Gassendi, La Mettrie, Diderot and d'Holbach brought these ideas into science and the criticism of religion, and Feuerbach and Marx transformed them into anthropological and historical materialism.

Materialist authors share a rejection of supernatural causes: the mind is understood as a function of an organized body, and the soul, if it exists at all, as something material and mortal. A simple example is a headache: its origin is sought in physical processes of the brain and nervous system, not in a principle separate from the body.

The term is also used in the social sciences, where historical materialism explains social change through factors such as technology, production or geography. Today the debate continues over what 'matter' means, since physics has discovered entities such as energy and fields, and over whether consciousness can be fully reduced to physical processes or requires other explanations.