materialism

Noun

materialism (countable and uncountable, plural materialisms)

1. Constant concern over material possessions and wealth; a great or excessive regard for worldly concerns.
   • We accept that a third of the population live on the poverty line. We accept that only a handful of the most exceptional of the children of the poor will make it through to a third-level education. We accept massive examples of greed and dishonesty in public life. We except the values of...2010, Nuala O'Faolain, “An Ugly Little War”, in A More Complex Truth

   Synonyms:

   hylism, hylicism

   Antonyms:

   spirituality

2. The philosophical belief that nothing exists beyond what is physical.
   • The result of the labours of philosophy appeared to be a total scepticism on the most important subjects of hu man duty and expectation. The irregular fears of a future state had been supplanted by the materialism of Epicurus; and this system—if system it may be called, which left them without a...1814, Joseph S. Buckminster, The Sermons by the Late Rev. Joseph S. Buckminster, Sermon I
   • Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. ... All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted...1902, William James, “Lecture I”, in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature […] , New York, N.Y.; London: Longmans, Green, and Co. […], →OCLC

   Synonyms:

   physicalism, philosophical materialism, thingism, hylism, hylicism, hylozoism

   Antonyms:

   idealism

3. (obsolete, rare) Synonym of matter, material substances in the aggregate.

   Synonyms:

   matter, material substances in the aggregate