Page "Materialism" Paragraph 1

To many philosophers, ' materialism ' is synonymous with ' physicalism '.

However, materialists have historically held that everything is made of matter, but physics has shown that gravity, for example, is not made of matter in the traditional sense of "' an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist '… So it is tempting to use ' physicalism ' to distance oneself from what seems a historically important but no longer scientifically relevant thesis of materialism, and related to this, to emphasize a connection to physics and the physical sciences.

" Therefore much of the generally philosophical discussion below on materialism may be relevant to physicalism.