Contingent Immaterialism traces the "simplicity argument" in its novel aspects using a "History of Ideas" approach or methodology. The chapters progress chronologically, covering a representative sampling of the different writers inculved in the history of the argument's revolutionary uses in order to show that there is a conceptual continuity of related problems and proposed solutions that stem from the basic form of the simplicity argument and that this proof has enjoyed, in the History of Ideas, a "life of its own". Chapter I provides an introduction to the simplicity argument in the context of previous studies. Chapter II discusses meanings and relations with respect to the simplicity argument. Chapter III investigates the freedom of self-consciousness and the simplicity argument. Chapter IV explores the simplicity argument and time in the work of Schopenhauer and Bergson. Chapter V contrasts the simplicity argument with the materialist theory of mind. Chapter VI examines the transcendences of consciousness. Chapter VII discusses time-consciousness. Finally, Chapter VIII, using as a backdrop the various aspects of the simplicity argument, provides an interdisciplinary approach to and study of human loneliness.
Ben Lazare Mijuskovic was born in Budapest in 1937. His father, a lawyer and diplomat, was attached to the Yugoslavian Embassy. During the Second World War, the family was transferred to the Embassy in Tel Aviv and later to Cairo, where his father joined the famous British Eighth Army, which was engaged in desert warfare against Erwin Rommel. In 1945, as the war was ending, the family was assigned to the Washington, D.C, Embassy. The family remained in the US, becoming naturalized in 1955, Mijuskovic did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (1972). He is a retired Professor of Philosophy (CSU) and a retired therapist (LSCW) from Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. He has written extensively (12 books and over 100 articles) on theories of consciousness in relationship to human loneliness using a History of Ideas approach, including Consciousness and Loneliness (2019), Metaphysical Dualism, Subjective Idealism and Existential Loneliness (2022); The Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy; Political Narcissism and the Problem of Evil (2022), Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas (2023); Plato's Battle Between the Gods and the Giants and its Continuing Relevance in the Speculative Philosophy of History (2024) and The Psychoanalytic Dynamics of Political Warfare (2025).