Idealism
Idealism is the school of philosophy that considers ideas to be separate entities of their own. Plato first put forth the notion of idealism with his Theory of Forms. According to Plato, ideas were eternal and absolute. The concept of ideas such as fairness or justice was as real to Plato as anything that could be touched or seen. The later … Keep Reading → works of Berkeley and Kant expanded on the theory of idealism. Berkeley took the extreme view that he called “immaterialism” that stated that nothing exists at all outside of the mind. It was his belief that all physical objects were merely subjective perceptions of the mind. Physical objects would therefore be different to all people based on individual perceptions. The work of Kant, which is known as transcendental idealism is similar to Berkeley’s extreme philosophy but Kant claimed that it was different because he acknowledged the reality of what he called “objects of sense.” Many people consider this distinction difficult and view the theories of Kant and Berkeley as fundamentally similar.
