A Defence of Idealism: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

A Defence of Idealism, credited to May Sinclair, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of A Defence of Idealism by May Sinclair. Read in English by Expatriate This bid defeats the function of turning off the tracking when the line stops The philosophy of Idealism, revived in eighteenth-century Europe by George Berkeley, argued against philosophical materialism by maintaining that Reality is a creation of the Mind. Despite its flourishing under the leadership of Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Schelling, Idealism had definitely fallen into decline late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. May Sinclair, the writer of many popular but philosophically provocative novels and part-time World War I ambulance corps-person, was an unlikely one to take up the torch of the old school and try to revive it yet again for the twentieth century. Most notably, in this treatise she tried to formulate a union of Idealistic Monism with the New Realism as epitomized by Bertrand Russell and his mathematics-based philosophy. How successful she was is a matter for the reader to judge, but this volume and its sequel (The New Idealism) provide fascinating insights into the mind of Sinclair herself, helping the twenty-first century reader better to understand this highly significant author as she wrote in the very midst of the Great War. - Summary by Expatriate

Recording facts

• Recording title: A Defence of Idealism
• Author credits: May Sinclair
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 34
• Listed recording duration: 12:27:38

Catalogue topics

• philosophy
• World War I
• idealism
• women's literature

Opening tracks: first 24 of 34

1. 01 - Author's Introduction — 27:52
2. 02 - I. The Pan-Psychism of Samuel Butler (1) — 24:17
3. 03 - I. The Pan-Psychism of Samuel Butler (2) — 23:06
4. 04 - I. The Pan-Psychism of Samuel Butler (3) — 19:42
5. 05 - I. The Pan-Psychism of Samuel Butler (4) — 24:01
6. 06 - II. Vitalism (1) — 24:12
7. 07 - II. Vitalism (2) — 20:59
8. 08 - III. Some Ultimate Questions of Psychology (1) — 24:11
9. 09 - III. Some Ultimate Questions of Psychology (2) — 22:34
10. 10 - III. Some Ultimate Questions of Psychology (3) — 25:40
11. 11 - III. Some Ultimate Questions of Psychology (4) — 20:04
12. 12 - IV. Some Ultimate Questions of Metaphysics (1) — 15:51
13. 13 - IV. Some Ultimate Questions of Metaphysics (2) — 21:57
14. 14 - V. Pragmatism & Humanism (1) — 25:34
15. 15 - V. Pragmatism &\ — 25:35
16. 16 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 1 (1) — 20:12
17. 17 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 1 (2) — 24:34
18. 18 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 1 (3) — 21:27
19. 19 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 1 (4) — 17:05
20. 20 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 2 (1) — 26:27
21. 21 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 2 (2) — 21:08
22. 22 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 3 (1) — 23:07
23. 23 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 3 (2) — 21:23
24. 24 - VI. The New Realism, Pt. 3 (3) — 15:49

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This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.