Search for crossword answers and clues
The doctrine that matter is the only reality
Answer for the clue "The doctrine that matter is the only reality ", 11 letters:
physicalism
Word definitions for physicalism in dictionaries
Wiktionary
Word definitions in Wiktionary
n. (context philosophy English) A philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things.
WordNet
Word definitions in WordNet
n. (philosophy) the philosophical theory that matter is the only reality [syn: materialism ]
Wikipedia
Word definitions in Wikipedia
In philosophy, physicalism is the ontological thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism —a "one substance " view ...
Usage examples of physicalism.
Nevertheless, science has progressed together with the ideology of scientific materialism that does embody a number of sacrosanct theories and a priori statements, namely the principles of objectivism, monism, universalism, reductionism, the closure principle, and physicalism.
Thus, in the infancy of Western metaphysical speculation, the principles of monism, physicalism, and re-ductionism were already prevalent.
While the nineteenth-century adoption of the closure principle denied causal efficacy to anything that is nonphysical, the twentieth-century version of physicalism denies that anything nonphysical even exists in reality.
One might just as well ask the same question of those scientists who believe that the empirical evidence does confirm the hypothesis of physicalism: Are they overinterpreting scientific evidence to make it conform to their metaphysical beliefs?
There are many scientists and philosophers, of course, who deny that physicalism is simply a metaphysical principle.