Physicalism

The view that everything is physical, or depends in the right way on what is physical.

Also: materialism, physicalist, materialist

What it means

Physicalism holds that everything that exists is physical, or stands in a suitable relation to the physical, including minds, societies and values. The word was introduced in the 1930s by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap and is often used interchangeably with the older term materialism. Stating the view precisely is hard. If 'physical' means whatever today's physics describes, physicalism is probably false, since physics is incomplete; if it means a future ideal physics, the thesis seems empty. This puzzle is known as Hempel's dilemma. Supervenience is widely treated as at most a necessary condition for physicalism. Its main challenge comes from consciousness, for instance Frank Jackson's knowledge argument about Mary the colour scientist.

The questions it belongs to

• 1.3.1 The Mind–Body ProblemHow can a thought move an arm?
• 1.11 Emergence and ReductionIs chemistry just physics, and biology just chemistry?

Thinkers

• Otto Neurath
• Rudolf Carnap
• David Lewis

Traditions

• Analytic

To read

• On the Plurality of Worlds — David Lewis
• The Logical Structure of the World (Der logische Aufbau der Welt) — Rudolf Carnap

Sources and further reading

• Physicalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Materialism (Britannica)
• Supervenience (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Written by the Coordinates of Thought editors and checked against the sources above on 29 October 2026. Not peer-reviewed. How we write and check.

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