The View from Everywhere : Realist Idealism without God

Helen Yetter-Chappell here explores novel ideas about the nature of reality and our place within it. She rigorously develops a nontheistic form of idealism and offers a unique account of how our minds relate to the world. This view renders reality intelligible and captures important elements of commonsense that are left out of a stark scientific image of the world. Other topics she explores include science, illusion, and the mind-body problem. The View from Everywhere shows that there are distinctive benefits to embracing idealism - benefits that should lead us to reassess our commitment to materialist orthodoxy.

Few contemporary philosophers take idealism seriously. The View from Everywhere aims to change this, developing a new quasi-Berkeleyan realist idealism, which does not depend upon God to do the metaphysical heavy lifting. This non-theistic idealism requires a fresh approach to the persistence and stability of the physical world. The resulting theory offers unique accounts of the nature of perception and the relationship between our minds and our bodies.When we peel away all the attributes of God that aren''t essential for ensuring the stability of the world, we''re left with a simpler and more intelligible metaphysical picture. On the resulting view, reality is a vast unity of consciousness that binds together experiences as-of every object from every perspective: a "tapestry" woven out of experiential "threads."Helen Yetter-Chappell seeks to fully flesh out this idealist metaphysics in a way that lets us make sense of the structure of reality and the deliverances of scientific inquiry, to consider the relationship between our minds and reality within an idealist framework, and to show that there are distinctive benefits to embracing idealism - benefits that should lead us to reassess our commitment to the materialist orthodoxy.