Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology (Synthese Library, 447)

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge.

Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities.

Gustavo E. Romero is Full Professor of Relativistic Astrophysics at the National University of La Plata, and Superior Researcher of the National Research Council of Argentina. A former President of the Argentine Astronomical Society, he is currently Director of the Argentine Institute for Radio Astronomy (IAR). His work focuses on black hole physics, high-energy astrophysics, cosmology, and scientific philosophy. He has published more than 400 papers on astrophysics, gravitation, the foundations of physics, philosophy, and 12 books, including Introduction to Black Hole Astrophysics (2014, with G. Vila) and Scientific Philosophy (2018), both published by Springer. He is a recipient of the Helmholtz International Award and the Houssay Prize, among other honours.

Javier Pérez-Jara is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Beijing Foreign Studies University and a Faculty Fellow at Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology. He has held visiting teaching and research positions across the world, including the University of Cambridge, Stanford University, Yale University, Kyoto University, Kyoto Sangyo University, the University of Seville, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the Taiwanese Fu Jen Catholic University, and Minzu University of China. He is the author of many publications on philosophy and social theory, and his current teaching and research explore the theoretical and practical bridges between scientific interdisciplinarity and philosophy.

Lino Camprubí is Ramón y Cajal fellow at the Department of Philosophy in the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. He obtained his PhD in History at UCLA and has been a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, as well as a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (The MIT Press, 2014) and co-editor of Technology and Globalisation: Networks of Experts in World History (Palgrave, 2018) and of the special issue Experiencing the Global Environment (in Studies in the History and Philosphy of Science, Part A, 2018). His Los ingenieros de Franco (Crítica, 2017) won the ICOHTEC 2018 Book Prize.