Philosophical Speculations

Hi all

If anyone is curious about idealism, chances are they will end up at Wikipedia. If you look there, you will get a completely distorted view of idealism.

For example, Bernardo’s views would presumably come under the wider article on “Objective Idealism” or “Analytic Idealism”, both of which point to an uninformative article on Josiah Royce.

A while back I added idealism under the “hard problem”, and included how Idealism avoids the problem entirely, and mentioned aspects of Bernardo’s perspective, but someone called Gazelle55 removed it all because ‘Kastrup is not even a significant minor contributor in this area’ -> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =982535962

Gazelle55 seems to be panpsychist, but either way I can’t see how my addition to this article can possibly be considered irrelevant to the “hard problem”. Even Chalmers references Bernardo and idealism as a promising solution to the hard problem.

I plan to contest the changes to the “hard problem” page, but I do think that:

-the Objective Idealism page needs to be rewritten, including a reference to
-analytic idealism, which needs it’s own page
-Bernardo should have his own page

I’m happy to find the time to do this, but I’m not sure my philosophical background is mature enough yet to do it justice. There are a few here who I’m sure could do a better job - Eugene, Ashvin etc. Is anyone happy to have a go at this?

I’ve added this on the talk page for the hard problem;

Someone called Gazelle55 removed the section on Idealism -> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =982535962

Given that this solution to the mind-body “hard problem” goes back to Plato, it’s difficult to see how a supporter of panpsychism (which arguably gives no explanatory power in this area) can just remove this section.

The “hard problem” was defined by David Chalmers, who writes “Overall, I think cosmic idealism is the most promising version of idealism, and is about as promising as any version of panpsychism. It should be on the list of the handful of promising approaches to the mind–body problem”. In this paper he explicitly refers to Kastrup as a key contributor to this “promising approach”

https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAT-11.pdf

I’m confused why people would be pushing a certain agenda, rather than trying to inform people about where our understanding sits, and what the potential solutions are?

Simon, I think what you wrote is pretty good and we can get around the reviewer's objections:
"As per the MOS, we should cover all majority and SIGNIFICANT minority view points. This only cites Kastrup, who is not prominent within the field despite his online following. Idealism could perhaps be included in the section with panpsychism and neutral monism, or be re-added if more proponents identified"

You might agree to include idealism into the section with panpsychism and neutral monism, and we can easily add more proponents, here is a few authors and references to their papers on idealism that you can add, all of them are academic philosophers publishing in professional philosophical journals:

Nagasawa, Y & Wager, K 2015, Panpsychism and Priority Cosmopsychism. in G Brüntrup (ed.), Papsychism, Oxford University Press.

ITAY SHANI, JOACHIM KEPPLER, Beyond Combination: How Cosmic Consciousness Grounds Ordinary Experience, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Volume 4, Issue 3, Fall 2018 , pp. 390-410

Itay Shani, Cosmopsychism: A Holistic Approach to the Metaphysics of Experience, Philosophical Papers 44 (3):389-437 (2015)

Miri Albahari, Perennial Idealism: A Mystical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem, Philosophers' Imprint 19 (2019)

Thanks Eugene, that may be an option. Even though Cosmic panpsychism is similar, the reason I didn’t include it the general panpsychism section originally is that it’s so different from what they describe that it’s categorically different. For example the intro is;

panpsychism holds that all physical entities have minds (though its proponents in fact take more qualified positions), while neutral monism, in at least some variations, holds that entities are composed of a substance with mental and physical aspects—and is thus sometimes described as a type of panpsychism.

If I was a random person curious about the hard problem, this section gives me no insight into how objective idealism solves the hard problem, short of a vague statement that “consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality”

Nonetheless I’m sure we can find a way to include it in a meaningful way. I’m a fan of Wikipedia in general, and it’s worth spending some time to help improve it. Your references will help with that.

Are you interested in contributing to tidying up the Idealism pages in general?

I agree and you can offer the reviewer two options:
- either include idealism into the title of the section, for example "Idealism, panpsychism and neutral monism"
- or split idealism into a separate section

I can contribute but I'm am amateur couch philosopher so I don't know if I would qualify to write in the wikipedias ...
I think the best way would be to do it collectively, perhaps in this topic

[removed various comments]
I think you’re right that collectively we could easily create a balanced, accurate and informative set of articles that are far better than what is there at present...

Stanford's Plato is also notable.