It was a synopsis already Materialism is a metaphysics the existence of this matter in this system is not in any way contingent to the mind thinking it

In fact, it's the other way around; in this metaphysic minds are a subset of it Schopenhauer calls materialism an explanation of the world through its most primordial self-subsisting non-mental objects

he essentially critiques it as still-born, a position "that would implode if carried out to its own conclusions" there are two kinds of materialism

There is the vulgar materialism of science where it breaks up the observed domain into atomic units and uses relations between these units to explain our experience of the domain the second type of materialism is the attempt to justify the former type philosophically this includes

(1) explaining why the aforementioned atomic unit is final

(2) how the model is self-complete and generates all of reality

The hard part here is

(1), this is because these parts would have to exhibit properties no other compound of them does

They would have to be self-subsistent

They would have to be eternal

They would have to be uniquely suited for the role of being the bedrock of reality for all of this, we would have to explain why but it gets weirder, at this most fundamental level the concept of a "cause" and "subsistence" stops making logical sense rather the only way to understand this origin is through the mind

The ancients knew this This is why they didn't draw a hard line between physicalism and the conceptual mental approach

This is part of the reason why they tried to understand nature, which we think is lifeless, through metaphors drawn from living beings

The very concept of physicality implies a bunch of mental content we take for granted the founders of modern science, Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, Locke, Newton, Kepler all understood this too They all subscribed to idealist, neoplatonic, pythagorean, occultic and/or other mystical positions we would consider "unscientific" now

In fact most of their metaphysical views are incredibly misconstrued Newton's assertion of bodies in space was a purely conceptual tool for doing mechanics he believed the ultimate force holding nature together were certain hidden qualities (qualitates occultae) that can be attributed to God

Locke, who was devoutly religious, essentially had the same view

Descartes denied the ultimate reality of his res extensa, i.e. physical space, as opposed to res cogitans, the mind modern materialism was really developed by French social philosophers (who were mostly speculative materialists themselves) of the mid to late 18th century, such as Baron d'Holbach

modern physicalists are caught between the vulgar materialism we described earlier and disdain for the "unscientific"