Bernardo Kastrup

Primary Contribution

Kastrup has done more than anyone to rehabilitate idealism as a serious philosophical position in contemporary analytic philosophy. His Analytical Idealism: consciousness is all there is; the physical world is its extrinsic appearance; individual minds are dissociated alters of a universal consciousness — analogous, at cosmic scale, to dissociative identity disorder. His argument is rigorous and directly engages the standard materialist objections. He draws explicit parallels between analytical idealism and Advaita Vedanta, arguing they are the same position arrived at by different routes. His work at the Essentia Foundation has created a platform for consciousness-first science that engages physicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers.

Key Ideas

• Analytical Idealism: consciousness is the sole ontological primitive — matter is what mental processes look like from the outside
• The dissociation metaphor: individual minds are dissociated alters of one universal consciousness, analogous to dissociative identity disorder
• The combination problem is dissolved: instead of asking how tiny consciousnesses combine into big ones, idealism starts from one consciousness that dissociates
• Explicit structural identity with Advaita Vedanta: what Shankara calls Brahman, Kastrup calls universal consciousness; what Shankara calls māyā, Kastrup calls the dashboard of perception
• Materialism's hard problem is not solvable within materialism — it is a category error, not an engineering challenge

Recommended Works

• The Idea of the World — the rigorous philosophical case for idealism
• Why Materialism Is Baloney — accessible introduction
• More Than Allegory — on myth, consciousness, and meaning