Early history Before Common Era (4th century BC), father of
atomism and teacher of
Democritus. Painting by
Luca Giordano, . Materialism developed, possibly independently, in several geographically separated regions of
Eurasia during what
Karl Jaspers termed the
Axial Age ( 800–200 BC). In
ancient Indian philosophy, materialism developed around 600 BC with the works of
Ajita Kesakambali,
Payasi,
Kanada and the proponents of the
Cārvāka school of philosophy. Kanada became one of the early proponents of
atomism. The
Nyaya–
Vaisesika school (c. 600–100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism (although their proofs of God and their positing that consciousness was not material precludes labelling them as materialists).
Buddhist atomism and the
Jaina school continued the atomic tradition.
Ancient Greek atomists like
Leucippus,
Democritus and
Epicurus prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem
De Rerum Natura by
Lucretius (99 – c. 55 BC) reflects the
mechanistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena result from different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called
atoms (literally "indivisibles").
De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations for phenomena such as erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound. Famous principles like "nothing can touch body but body" first appeared in Lucretius's work. Democritus and Epicurus did not espouse a monist ontology, instead espousing the ontological separation of matter and space (i.e. that space is "another kind" of being).
Epicureanism is a philosophy of materialism from
classical antiquity that was a major forerunner of
modern science. Classical atomism predates
Epicurus: 5th‑century BCE thinkers
Leucippus and
Democritus explained all change as the collisions of indivisible atoms moving in the void. Epicureanism refined this materialist picture. Epicurus held that everything—including mind—consists solely of atoms moving in the void; to explain how parallel falling atoms could meet, he postulated the
clinamen, an extremely slight lateral deviation that initiates collisions without supernatural causes and that need not imply genuine indeterminism.
Early Common Era Wang Chong (27 – c. 100 AD) was a Chinese thinker of the early
Common Era said to be a materialist. Later Indian materialist
Jayaraashi Bhatta (6th century) in his work
Tattvopaplavasimha (
The Upsetting of All Principles) refuted the
Nyāya Sūtra epistemology. The materialistic
Cārvāka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400; when
Madhavacharya compiled
Sarva-darśana-samgraha (
A Digest of All Philosophies) in the 14th century, he had no Cārvāka (or Lokāyata) text to quote from or refer to. In early 12th-century
al-Andalus,
Arabian philosopher Ibn Tufail ( Abubacer) discussed materialism in his
philosophical novel,
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (
Philosophus Autodidactus), while vaguely foreshadowing
historical materialism.
Modern philosophy '' by
Lucretius, 1682. In France,
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1665) represented the materialist tradition in opposition to the attempts of
René Descartes (1596–1650) to provide the
natural sciences with dualist foundations. There followed the materialist and
atheist abbé Jean Meslier (1664–1729), along with the
French materialists:
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751),
Denis Diderot (1713–1784),
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780),
Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), German-French
Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), and other French
Enlightenment thinkers. In England, materialism was developed in the philosophies of
Francis Bacon (1561–1626),
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and
John Locke (1632–1704).
Scottish Enlightenment philosopher
David Hume (1711–1776) became one of the most important materialist philosophers in the 18th century.
John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822) believed matter has a
moral dimension, which had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of
William Wordsworth (1770–1850). In
late modern philosophy, German atheist
anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach signaled a new turn in materialism in his 1841 book
The Essence of Christianity, which presented a
humanist account of religion as the outward projection of man's inward nature. Feuerbach introduced
anthropological materialism, a version of materialism that views materialist anthropology as the
universal science. Feuerbach's variety of materialism heavily influenced
Karl Marx, who in the late 19th century elaborated the concept of
historical materialism—the basis for what Marx and
Friedrich Engels outlined as
scientific socialism: Through his
Dialectics of Nature (1883), Engels later developed a "materialist dialectic"
philosophy of nature, a worldview that
Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian
Marxism, called
dialectical materialism. In early 20th-century
Russian philosophy,
Vladimir Lenin further developed dialectical materialism in his 1909 book
Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which connects his opponents' political conceptions to their anti-materialist philosophies. A more
naturalist-oriented materialist school of thought that developed in the mid-19th century was
German materialism, which included
Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899), the Dutch-born
Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893), and
Carl Vogt (1817–1895), even though they had different views on core issues such as the evolution and the origins of life. According to Marxist theoretician
George Novack, despite the multiplicity of named schools, philosophy ultimately confronts a single binary: materialism versus idealism.
Contemporary history Analytic philosophy Contemporary
analytic philosophers (e.g.
Daniel Dennett,
Willard Van Orman Quine,
Donald Davidson, and
Jerry Fodor) operate within a broadly physicalist or
scientific materialist framework, producing rival accounts of how best to accommodate the
mind, including
functionalism,
anomalous monism, and
identity theory. Scientific materialism is often synonymous with, and has typically been described as, a
reductive materialism. In the early 21st century,
Paul and
Patricia Churchland advocated a radically contrasting position (at least in regard to certain hypotheses):
eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialism holds that some mental phenomena simply do not exist at all, and that talk of such phenomena reflects a spurious "
folk psychology" and
introspection illusion. A materialist of this variety might believe that a concept like "belief" has no basis in fact (e.g. the way folk science speaks of demon-caused illnesses). With reductive materialism at one end of a continuum (our theories will
reduce to facts) and eliminative materialism at the other (certain theories will need to be
eliminated in light of new facts),
revisionary materialism is somewhere in the middle.
Continental philosophy Contemporary
continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze attempted to rework and strengthen classical materialist ideas. Contemporary theorists such as
Manuel DeLanda, working with this reinvigorated materialism, have come to be classified as
new materialists.
New materialism has become its own subfield, with courses on it at major universities, as well as numerous conferences, edited collections and monographs devoted to it.
Jane Bennett's 2010 book
Vibrant Matter has been particularly instrumental in bringing theories of monist ontology and
vitalism back into a critical theoretical fold dominated by
poststructuralist theories of language and discourse. New materialism has been criticized by scholars of
critical race, Indigenous, and
queer studies, who argue it neglects questions of race, gender, and colonialism, and by others who question whether its claims are genuinely novel given that Indigenous and animist traditions have long held views about the agency or
vitality of matter. In
Being and Event (1988),
Alain Badiou developed a materialist position using
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. Badiou argues that mathematics, rather than physics or human perception, reveals the metaphysical structure of reality, and that this structure is pure multiplicity without any foundational substance or unifying
One.
Quentin Meillassoux has developed
speculative materialism, a position that seeks to escape what he calls "correlationism", the post-Kantian view that thought cannot access reality independent of its relation to the subject. ==Defining "matter"==