The aim of the book is to refute physical realism and establish in its place a form of phenomenalistic idealism. Physical realism, in the relevant sense, takes the physical world to be something whose existence is both logically independent of the human mind and philosophically fundamental. There are a number of problems for this realist view, but the main objection is that it does not accord the world the empirical immanence it needs if it is to qualify as our world, as a world for us. Phenomenalistic idealism rejects the realist view in both its aspects. It takes the world to be something wh ... More

The aim of the book is to refute physical realism and establish in its place a form of phenomenalistic idealism. Physical realism, in the relevant sense, takes the physical world to be something whose existence is both logically independent of the human mind and philosophically fundamental. There are a number of problems for this realist view, but the main objection is that it does not accord the world the empirical immanence it needs if it is to qualify as our world, as a world for us. Phenomenalistic idealism rejects the realist view in both its aspects. It takes the world to be something whose existence is ultimately constituted by facts about human sensory experience, or by some richer complex of non-physical facts in which such experiential facts centrally feature. The book seeks to establish a specific version of this idealism, in which the experiential facts that centrally feature in the constitutive creation of the world concern the organization of human sensory experience. The basic idea of this version is that, in the context of certain other constitutively relevant factors, this sensory organization creates the physical world by disposing things to appear systematically worldwise at the human empirical viewpoint. Chief among the other relevant factors is the role of God as the one who is responsible for the sensory organization and ordains the system of appearance it yields. It is this that gives the idealistically created world its objectivity and allows it to qualify as a real world.