materialism

From French matérialisme; surface etymology is material +‎ -ism.

materialism (countable and uncountable, plural materialisms)

1. Constant concern over material possessions and wealth; a great or excessive regard for worldly concerns.
   • 2010, Nuala O'Faolain, A More Complex Truth, "An Ugly Little War":

     We accept that a third of the population live on the poverty line. We accept that only a handful of the most exceptional of the children of the poor will make it through to a third-level education. We accept massive examples of greed and dishonesty in public life. We except the values of materialism. What do we expect then—to be left un-harassed, we who have all the privileges?

2. (philosophy) The philosophical belief that nothing exists beyond what is physical.
   • 1814, Joseph S. Buckminster, The Sermons by the Late Rev. Joseph S. Buckminster, Sermon I:

     The result of the labours of philosophy appeared to be a total scepticism on the most important subjects of hu man duty and expectation. The irregular fears of a future state had been supplanted by the materialism of Epicurus; and this system—if system it may be called, which left them without a God, a providence, a morality, or a retribution—was the fashionable philosophy of the more cultivated classes.

   • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture I:

     Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. ... All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.

3. (obsolete, rare) Material substances in the aggregate; matter.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of A. Chalmers to this entry?)

• (philosophy): physicalism
• (philosophy): philosophical materialism

• (philosophy): idealism

• philosophical materialism

• materialistic
• materialist

• idealism
• physicalism

• materialism in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• materialism in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911
• "materialism" in Raymond Williams, Keywords (revised), 1983, Fontana Press, page 197.

materiell +‎ -ism

materialism c

1. materialism

• materialist
• materialistisk