Some materialists doubt that beliefs, as we picture them, exist at all
Materialism says matter comes first and mind arises from it, but its boldest modern form goes further. Paul and Patricia Churchland argued that some everyday mental notions may be as mistaken as blaming illness on demons. The underlying idea is ancient, surfacing independently in India, Greece and China over two thousand years ago.
The core claim is a monism: one kind of stuff underlies everything, and consciousness depends on physical processes such as those in the brain. Physics complicated the picture by revealing gravity, energy and spacetime, which are physical but hardly inert matter. That is one reason many prefer physicalism, a term Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle introduced in the 1930s, while materialism had entered English late in the 17th century. Mary Midgley even questioned whether matter is a well-defined concept.
Karl Jaspers placed the doctrine's birth in the Axial Age, roughly 800 to 200 BC. In India, the Charvaka school and thinkers such as Kanada, an early atomist, were active around 600 BC. Greek atomists pictured atoms, literally indivisibles, moving through void, and Lucretius's Latin poem De Rerum Natura used that picture to explain wind, sound and evaporation. Epicurus added the swerve, a tiny sideways drift letting falling atoms collide without divine help. In China, Wang Chong is described as a materialist of the first century. The Charvaka tradition seems to have vanished after about 1400, leaving a 14th-century compiler with no texts of theirs to cite.
Early modern debate sharpened the lines. Pierre Gassendi opposed Descartes's dualism; Hobbes and later Hume carried the torch in Britain, and a cluster of French Enlightenment writers including Diderot and d'Holbach pushed materialism toward atheism. Ludwig Feuerbach's 1841 book on Christianity read religion as humanity projecting its own nature outward, an idea that shaped Karl Marx's historical materialism, which traced social change to how goods are produced and exchanged.
Today's analytic philosophers, from Quine to Dennett, mostly work within a physicalist frame yet disagree on how mind fits. Reductive materialists expect psychology to be explained by lower-level science. Jerry Fodor rejected that, arguing that laws of special sciences such as geology are invisible from basic physics. Critics remain: Christian List contends that first-person facts, simply being oneself, cannot rest on physical facts, which he thinks refutes physicalism.
Source: Materialism
