Your English writing platform
Discover LudwigExact(1)
Transcendental idealism, also called formalistic idealism, term applied to the epistemology of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held that the human self, or transcendental ego, constructs knowledge out of sense impressions and from universal concepts called categories that it imposes upon them.
Similar(59)
These metaphysical consequences consist in a thoroughgoing idealism (a term, however, never used by Berkeley himself, who preferred to call his position "immaterialism") with respect to the nature and constitution of things or substances.
Before surveying these competing views, however, something needs to be said about the confusing term "idealism", and about the variety of idealism that is characteristic of Hegel and other German idealists.
(Berkeley himself did not use the term "idealism").
"Idealism" is a term that had been used sporadically by Leibniz and his followers to refer to a type of philosophy that was opposed to materialism.
It is also remarkable that the term "idealism", at least within philosophy, is often used in such a way that it gets its meaning through what is taken to be its opposite: as the meaningful use of the term "outside" depends on a contrast with something considered to be inside, so the meaning of the term "idealism" is often fixed by what is taken to be its opposite.
For this reason, Lusthaus refers to Yogācāra as "phenomenology".[50] A final complaint is that the use of the term "idealism" is anachronistic or for some other reason inappropriate in its application to pre-modern India.
Is the term "idealism" acceptable for the view that, even if nothing expressible in language has ultimate reality, mental events are still more real than physical events, which do not have even conventional reality?
Although we have just referred to Plato, the term "idealism" became the name for a whole family of positions in philosophy only in the course of the 18th century.
It is one thing (perhaps already stretching the meaning) to apply the term "idealism," as R.P. Srivastava (1973) does, to modern thinkers whose views have been influenced by European idealists, such as Aurobindo, Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan.
After all, the connotations of the term "idealism" in the era of Kant and the earlier post-Kantians could have led to the expectation that in favoring or in devising an idealistic approach to what objects and reality have to be one has to agree that there is a certain priority to thinking in the constitution of objects and their collective behavior.
Write better and faster with AI suggestions while staying true to your unique style.
Since I tried Ludwig back in 2017, I have been constantly using it in both editing and translation. Ever since, I suggest it to my translators at ProSciEditing.

Justyna Jupowicz-Kozak
CEO of Professional Science Editing for Scientists @ prosciediting.com