Discuss the Nature and Appeal of Materialism

The enduring appeal of materialism arises from its alliance with those sciences that have contributed most to an understanding of the world humans inhabit. Investigations in the physical sciences have a materialist methodology; that is, they attempt to explain a class of phenomena by appeal to physical conditions alone. The claim of materialists is that there is no subject matter that cannot be adequately treated with a materialist methodology. This claim cannot be established by any scientific investigation; it can be established, if at all, only by critical reflection on the whole range of human thought and experience.

Early philosophers proceeded dogmatically, aiming to prove the material nature of the world by mere reflection on what must be. Contemporary materialists are much more modest, offering the claim as a speculative but reasonable generalization from the progress of the physical sciences.

Materialism has been, traditionally, a minority view, indeed a rather daring and scandalous one, but it has made considerable progress over the past century, particularly among educated European peoples. There seem to be three main reasons for this. First, the rise of what might be called “cosmic naturalism”; there has been a decline in those aspects of religious conviction that involve appeal to providential or satanic interventions in the course of events, so that pestilence or climate change, for example, are not attributed to nonmaterial, supernatural forces. Second, the rise of “medical materialism”; the discovery of the biochemical mechanisms involved in neural functioning, and their links to psychological processes, so that it is now taken for granted that thinking, feeling, and the will are subserved by the nervous system, and can be altered by making physical changes by the use of drugs or electrodes. A malfunction of the mind is taken to be a malfunction of the brain….