Materialism — A metaphysical position holding that reality is fundamentally material: everything that exists is matter or depends on it, and there are no immaterial substances — such as souls, spirits, or disembodied minds — subsisting in their own right. The term derives from the Latin materia, and the thesis stands directly opposed to idealism (which makes spirit or idea the primary reality) and to dualism (which admits two distinct substances). Its roots reach back to the Greek atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, who held that everything is composed of atoms and void; this lineage continues in Epicurus and in Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura. In the modern era, thinkers such as Hobbes and the French Enlightenment materialists (La Mettrie, d’Holbach) reduced phenomena, including thought itself, to bodies in motion. The most influential version on the historical and social plane is Marx’s historical materialism, according to which the material conditions of production determine forms of consciousness and the legal, political, and cultural superstructures. In contemporary philosophy of mind, materialism reappears as physicalism: reductive materialism claims that mental states are identical to brain states, while eliminative materialism (Paul and Patricia Churchland) holds that commonsense notions such as “belief” or “desire” name nothing real and will be replaced by neuroscience. A clear example of the thesis is to regard pain not as an event of a soul but as a pattern of neural activity. Materialism thus converses with naturalism and physicalism, distinguishing itself from them by the weight it gives to matter as the ultimate principle of the real.
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