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In one view, materialism expresses the view that the only thing that exists is matter; if anything else, such as mental events, exists, then it is reducible to matter.

"Materialism" has also frequently been understood to designate an entire scientific, " rationalistic" world view, particularly by religious thinkers opposed to it and also by Marxists. It typically contrasts with dualism, phenomenalism, idealism, and vitalism.

For Marxism, materialism is central to the " materialist conception of history", which centers on the empirical world of actual human activity (practice, including labor) and institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity. In this view, subjective thoughts and speech affect the historical process only via practice.

Materialism has also developed as a pejorative label for a lifestyleIn sociology, a lifestyle is the way a person (or a group) lives. This includes patterns of social relations, consumption, entertainment, and dress. A lifestyle typically also reflects an individual's attitudes, values or worldview. Having a specific "lif pursuing wealth, money, and objects rather than spiritual or mental development.

The definition of "matter" in modern philosophical materialism extends to all scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, and the curvature of space. In this view, one might speak of the " material world".

1 Varieties of materialism

• French materialismFrench materialism combined the associationist psychology and Empiricism of John Locke with the Totality of Isaac Newton to create a complex world view in diametrical opposition to the Cartesian dualist world view. Man a Machine by La Mettrie led the mate
• Eliminative materialismIn the philosophy of mind, eliminative materialism is the school of thought that argues for an absolute version of materialism and physicalism with respect to mental entities and mental vocabulary. It principally argues that our common-sense understanding
• Reductive materialismReductive materialism ( Identity Theory) claims that there is no independent, autonomous level of phenomena in the world that would correspond to the level of conscious mental states. It also states that the level of conscious phenomena is indentical with
• Emergent materialismEmergent materialism asserts that we will never understand the mechanism of emergence: it will always seem to us like emergence is magical. Colin McGinn argues that the problem is that we're too stupid to understand how strong emergence happens. To explai

2 History of materialism

Ancient Greek philosophersClassical (or "early") Greek philosophy focused on the role of reason and inquiry. In many ways it paved the way both to modern science and to modern philosophy. Clear unbroken lines of influence lead from early Greek philosophers, through early Muslim ph like ParmenidesParmenides of Elea ( 5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the Southern coast of Italy. He is one of the most significant of the pre-Socratic philosophers. He argued that the common-sense belief in the reality of t, Epicurus, and even Aristotle prefigure later materialists. Later on, Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi represent the materialist tradition, in opposition to René Descartes' attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. Later materialists included Denis Diderot and other French enlightenment thinkers, as well as Ludwig Feuerbach.

In recent years, Paul and Patricia Churchland have advocated an extreme form of materialism, eliminativist materialism, which holds that mental phenomena simply do not exist at all -- that talk of the mental reflects a totally spurious " folk psychology" that simply has no basis in fact, something like the way that folk science speaks of demon-caused illness.