The philosophical view that everything that exists is ultimately physical matter in motion, with no separate spiritual or immaterial realm beyond the natural world. Ancient atomists like Democritus and Lucretius developed early materialist positions; Hobbes was one of the most rigorous early modern materialists, applying the framework to psychology, ethics, and politics in ways that scandalized his religious contemporaries. Modern naturalistic philosophy and most of the cognitive sciences work within broadly materialist frameworks.
Tradition
Materialism
The philosophical view that everything that exists is ultimately physical matter in motion, with no separate spiritual or immaterial realm.
Thinkers
Thinker
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky was an AI pioneer of broadly Enlightenment, scientific-rationalist outlook whose materialist theory of mind reshaped debates over machine autonomy and the political stakes of technology
ThinkerPeter Kropotkin
1842–1921
Peter Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist communist whose Mutual Aid and The Conquest of Bread built the most systematic positive case for a cooperative society organized without the state
ThinkerThomas Hobbes
1588–1679
Thomas Hobbes was the philosopher of absolute sovereignty who invented the social contract framework and argued that only an all-powerful Leviathan could save human beings from each other
ThinkerFriedrich Engels
1820–1895
Friedrich Engels was a revolutionary communist and Marx's co-author, whose financial support, editing, and independent works made Marxism possible as a systematic political philosophy
ThinkerNick Land
Nick Land is a British philosopher of right accelerationism whose anti-egalitarian 'Dark Enlightenment' writings made him a touchstone of the online neoreactionary right
ThinkerFrank Salter
Frank Salter is an Australian ethologist whose theory of “ethnic genetic interests” gave ethnonationalist and identitarian currents a sociobiological vocabulary for ethnic self-preservation
ThinkerVladimir Lenin
1870–1924
Vladimir Lenin was the Bolshevik revolutionary who transformed Marxism from a philosophy of history into an operational manual for seizing state power — and then used it
Related through shared thinkers