solipsism

verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Share
Share to social media
URL
https://www.britannica.com/topic/solipsism
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Print
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Share
Share to social media
URL
https://www.britannica.com/topic/solipsism
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Related Topics:
subjective idealism

solipsism, in philosophy, an extreme form of subjective idealism that denies that the human mind has any valid ground for believing in the existence of anything but itself. The British idealist F.H. Bradley, in Appearance and Reality (1893), characterized the solipsistic view as follows:

I cannot transcend experience, and experience must be my experience. From this it follows that nothing beyond my self exists; for what is experience is its [the self’s] states.

Presented as a solution of the problem of explaining human knowledge of the external world, it is generally regarded as a reductio ad absurdum. The only scholar who seems to have been a coherent radical solipsist is Claude Brunet, a 17th-century French physician.

This article was most recently revised and updated by John M. Cunningham.