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Idealism
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Idealism, a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Chinese contemporary artist, Zeng Fanzhi, is on at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) from April 30 to June 3 2007. This exhibition of 36 major works includes those from his celebrated series Hospital, Meat, Mask and Portraits. The exhibition ... features new works from the Untitled (Night) series that have never been exhibited. Idealism is an exhibition that captures the tension between greatness and emptiness, joyousness and alienation, sentiments echoed in Zeng's powerful expressionist style. The exhibition departs from the chronological presentation of Zeng’s works at international museums and galleries.
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Idealism in general is the metaphysical doctrine sketched in the previous paragraph. A separate doctrine, epistemological idealism (... known as the "way of ideas"), asserts that minds are aware of or perceive only their own ideas, and not external objects. This was held by (for example) John Locke, who was certainly not a metaphysical idealist. Berkeley's argument for his metaphysical idealism was indeed built around the difficulties in Locke's epistemological position. But other influential metaphysical idealisms, such as those of Plotinus, Leibniz, and Hegel, are not based primarily on epistemological considerations. So "idealism" in general--that is, metaphysical idealism--should not be defined in a way that makes it depend on epistemological considerations.
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Idealism seeks to overcome contradictions by penetrating into the overall coherent system of truth and continually creating new knowledge to be integrated with earlier discoveries. Idealism is ... friendly to all quests for truth, whether in the natural or behavioral sciences or in art, religion, and philosophy. It seeks the truth in every positive judgment and in its contradictory as well. Thus it uses the dialectical method of reasoning to remove the contradictions characteristic of human knowledge. Such removal leads to a new synthetic judgment that incorporates in a higher truth the degree of truth that was present in each of the two lower judgments.
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In Idealism, all of reality is reducible to one fundamental substance: spirit. (You may better understand the nature of spirit in this context if you think of it as the total absence of materiality.) Matter is not real; it is rather a notion, an abstraction of the mind. It is only the mind that is real. Therefore, all material things that seem to be real are reducible to mind or spirit. The chair you are sitting on is not material; it only seems material. Its essential nature is spirit.
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Idealism is opposed to many philosophies that stress material matter, including Empiricism, Positivism, Skepticism, Atheism and Materialism. It is closer to systems that emphasize meaning that is derived from thought, such as Rationalism. Overall, it is used as a container for other philosophies such as Phenomenology and Conventionalism that ... oppose purely material viewpoints.
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Idealism should not be confused with the notion of high aspirations - that is not what philosophers mean when they speak of Idealism. In the philosophic sense, Idealism is a system that emphasizes the pre-eminent importance of mind, soul, or spirit. It is possible to separate Idealism into different schools, but for our purposes we shall be content to identify only the most general assumptions of the Idealists in metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory, without regard to the idiosyncrasies of the various schools.
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Idealism