Bernardo Kastrup

Bernardo Kastrup (1974–present) is a Dutch-Brazilian author with PhDs in computer engineering and philosophy who has become the leading contemporary systematizer of “analytic idealism” — the metaphysical position that consciousness is the sole fundamental reality, and that the physical world is what universal mind (“mind-at-large”) looks like from a particular vantage point.

In books such as The Idea of the World (2019) and Why Materialism Is Baloney, he argues, with explicit logical rigor, that individual minds are “dissociated alters” of one underlying consciousness, drawing an analogy to dissociative identity disorder.

He runs the Essentia Foundation, which promotes idealism as a serious philosophical and scientific worldview. Kastrup’s importance is that he gives consciousness-first metaphysics its most disciplined, argument-driven modern formulation, deliberately distancing it from “woo.” This is legitimate philosophy (a defensible if minority idealist position) rather than empirical science, and Kastrup is careful: he does not claim the Law of Attraction works, that you can manifest a parking spot, or that individual intention reshapes the shared world at will — indeed he is often critical of New Age literalism.

However, because his conclusion (“reality is fundamentally mental”) superficially matches manifestation premises, his work is widely cited by spiritual and manifestation communities as intellectual cover. The honest framing distinguishes his rigorous idealism from the mind-over-matter claims it is borrowed to support.

Tier: legitimate-philosophy (idealism as a metaphysical position), not science and not manifestation.