Not to get all Foucauldian or anything, but I wonder how our cultural understanding of the presumptive answer to this question (matter comes first) is influenced by power. Seems like we’re mostly English-speaking here, most of us probably from the US or another European country, or at least one that has reaped the benefits of a global capitalist order built on colonialism and imperialism. Undoubtedly, the people who have maintained power in our world get a bigger say in knowledge production and have since knowledge was produced (person who killed someone else gets to produce knowledge, the killed person does not). It makes sense that people who survive and thrive in power would claim that the material world comes first because the belief and articulation of a consciousness-first world would leave more open-ended ethical questions that one would be keen to answer.