What is medical materialism?
Via Scoop.it - Consciousness
The concept of “medical materialism,” so well described by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, is just one more form of reductionism that is sometimes applied to matters of religion. For our purposes here, we will define “reductionism” as any attempt to explain the greater in terms of the lesser, that is, any attempt to explain something large and deep and complex in terms of categories drawn from something simpler and smaller and easier to understand. Reductionistic explanations do appeal to some people because they make something complex seem as if it can be understood in terms of something smaller and simpler to grasp. If we want to belittle the love that exists between two people and say that it’s really nothing special, we might say that their “love” is nothing more than the actions resulting from hormones acting on their brains; or that their happy marriage is nothing but a mutually selfish relationship of economic convenience for both of them. What this does is attempt to reduce (hence the term “reductionism”) the significance and meaning of something by ascribing it to more trivial causes. It is trying to explain the greater in terms of the lesser.
Via members.pioneer.net
