The Idea of Idealism

In everyday language, idealism means an approach to life targeted on lofty aspirations. Philosophical idealism is different: the idea that only ideas exist. It would be easier to understand, perhaps, if it were renamed 'idea-ism'.

There are stray indications in the texts of the first millennium BC that a notion along these lines had occurred to thinkers in Ancient India, China, and Greece. At first glance, this idea so closely resembles Plato's theory that only ideal 'forms' are real that some people have confusingly called this 'idealism', too. In the strictest sense of the term, however, idealism was not systematically formulated until the Anglo-Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkley did so in the early 18th century.