ABSTRACT
Materialist would be the one who pays attention to the materiality of the world, to matter, and materials. A true materialist has to show in which sense and to which extent the world is material and not only to declare it. The exception that any spiritualist or any idealist wants to protect against the corrosive attack of materialism has a proper name, a name that traversed History and survived: God. Socrates was certainly not a materialist as such, but his philosophy required everyone to confront the harsh materiality of the activity of thinking. But even a God needs creatures able to make sense of his/her existence – or his/her death. Materialism is the capacity to accept the lessons of the Real, even when they hurt. Yet it would be a big mistake to imagine that God – like his by-products – is the only target of the materialist tradition: Spiritualist, idealist, and immaterialist representations can take new forms.
