Excerpt from The New Realism: Coöperative Studies in Philosophy On July 21, 1910, we published a brief article entitled 'The Program and First Platform of Six Realists,' in which we indicated the direction philosophical inquiry ought to take. We there asserted that advance would be facilitated by cooperative investigations; and the drafting of the platform was a first attempt to confirm this belief. The present volume continues, on a larger scale, the work there inaugurated; and we hope it will (...) be followed by other collections of studies. The introductory essay voices our common opinions. The other essays do so only in part. It has seemed best to publish them without laboring for complete unanimity, inasmuch as their agreements quite overshadow their differences. They have been written after prolonged conferences. A few important debatable topics are briefly discussed by dissenting members in the Appendix. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as longstanding (...) debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (shrink)

By recognizing Immanuel Kant as the founder of the so-called being-knowing fallacy, the Italian new realism proposed and defended by Maurizio Ferraris argues for the autonomy of ontology from epistemology. The dependence of reality on our conceptual framework would in fact transform our world in a system of beliefs that loses its connection with the “hardness” of the given data. This paper discusses Ferraris’s claims by maintaining that they are based upon an insufficient reading of history of philosophy, particularly, (...) upon a misinterpretation of Kant’s philosophy. Firstly, we shortly analyze the relationship between transcendental philosophy and post-modernism through a comparison with Friedrich Nietzsche: we criticize their conflation. Secondly, we take into consideration Kant’s arguments about science and answer a particular objection of Ferraris by investigating how we can legitimately acquire knowledge in the deep past without contradicting Kantianism. In this sense, we believe that the new realism presents inconsistent arguments. (shrink)

In this essay I try to give some overall statements in order to show that new realism is to be understood as a kind of positive philosophy. Against constructivism, I argue that there is a prevalence of the objects themselves on our understanding of them because reality offers a resistance to our attempt to grasp it depending on its level of dependence from our own understanding, which is different in the case of natural objects, ideal object and social object. (...) This negativity leads to an ontological necessity of facticity. In the second part of this paper I will describe – through the exposition of three key concepts of new realism, i.e. “unamendability”, “interaction” and “affordance” – an ascending path for which the negative and the resistance turn into positivity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to redefine the role of media in contemporary society, in the light of the theories of new realism and documentality. The chapter starts by refuting the view that everything is socially constructed and that the media actually produce reality (postmodernism). It argues that, instead, both media and social reality emerge from a solid ground of reality that is independent of thought (new realism). The chapter also claims that (contrary to Searle’s view) the (...) fundamental rule of social reality is that of documentality: that is to say, documents produce social reality as a whole, including media. Finally, it posits that human thought (and, therefore, social reality, which is one of its sophisticated products) ultimately does not only depend on being, but also emerges out of it. (shrink)

The recent ‘new realist’ wave in philosophy reacts to the postmodernist/deconstructivist rejection of the notions of truth and objectivity by affirming the priority of the real over the subjective and socially constructed. Crucial in this dynamics is, among other things, the refusal of the anti-scientific stance integral to the non-realist view. In light of this, it is advisable to look at the new realism vs. antirealism debate from the perspective of the seemingly more local dispute concerning scientific realism (...) vs. antirealism. Indeed, doing this enables one to exploit elements that are peculiar to the discussion concerning the epistemic content of scientific theories with a view to properly evaluating, and even clarifying and further articulating, the ‘new realist’ stance itself. (shrink)

For the past thirty years postmodernism has been the major philosophical trend. Starting as a potentially emancipatory tool, though, it has virtually resolved into an acceptance of any kind of position, in the name of a very politically correct relativism. The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of New Realism in its opposition and reaction to Postmodernism, showing that it does not imply a return to a ‘traditional’ or ‘strong’ realism but that, on the contrary, (...) it involves a kind of ‘weak realism’: a blend between realism and constructivism. An analysis of the implications of both philosophical approaches in diverse fields will be offered, from epistemology, to politics, to ethics. Where postmodern epistemological claims will be proved to be quite easily confutable, its ethical implications will be faced more carefully. Ethical new realism will, therefore, be presented as particularly challenging, but also promising and important to the future of philosophy. (shrink)

Feminist Standpoint Theory claims that by virtue of their social positioning women have access to, or can achieve, particular and/or better knowledge of gendered social relations. The epistemology, various versions of which are reviewed in the paper, has been criticised for over homogenising women. In its simplest form this critique claims that women’s diversity rules out communality and collective interests, and that FST unawarely takes white middle class Western women as representative. In its stronger, postructuralist form this critique undermines feminism (...) by reducing the category ‘women’ to an effect of discourse whose referent is, and should be, constantly shifting. The paper argues for the reality of sex difference and puts forward a realist defence of a modified Feminist Standpoint Theory. (shrink)

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In the field of contemporary continental ontology, Speculative realist thinkers are now grappling with the genealogy of their ideas in the history of modern philosophy. The Speculative Realism movement prompted a debate, criticizing the predominant postmodernist orientation in philosophy, which located its origins in Kantian "correlationism" which supposedly ended the period of early modern naive realist metaphysics by showing that the mind and the outside world can only ever be understood as correlates. The debate over a new kind of (...) realism has attracted many supporters and critics. In order to refocus its specific interpretation of modern philosophy in general and of the Kantian gesture in particular, this volume brings together major authors working on contemporary ontology and historians of ideas. It underlines and illustrates the fact that contemporary continental philosophy is rediscovering its past in original ways by productively re-interpreting some of the key concepts of modern philosophy. The perspectives and accounts of the key concepts of the history of philosophy are different in the views of individual contributors, and sometimes radically so, yet the discussion between contemporary realists and their critics shows that the real battleground of new ideas lies not in developing the philosophical motifs of the end of the 20th century, but rather in rethinking the milestones of modern philosophy. (shrink)

The paper set up a small “philosophical lab” for thought experiments using Digital Universes as its main tool. Digital Universes allow us to examine how mereology affects the debate on New Realism of Ferraris and shed new light on the whole notion of Realism. The semi-formal framework provides a convenient way to model the varieties of realism that are important for the program of New Realism: we then draw the natural consequences of this approach into the (...) ontology of our world, arguing that the same considerations that apply to Digital Universe would hold for chess, institutions and social objects as well. Once a particular version of mereology is chosen, there are unavoidable consequences that the very underlying structure of social ontology. We then propose a new New Realism to tackle social objects: social objects turn out to be nothing more than mereological sums, picked up by some description. (shrink)

Realitism: the postmodern attack on reality -- Realism: things that have existed since the beginning of the world -- Reconstruction: why criticism starts from reality -- Emancipation: unexamined life has no value.

It is still a widespread assumption that metaphysics and ontology deal with roughly the same questions. They are supposed to be concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and to give an account of the meaning of 'existence' or 'being' in line with the broadest possible metaphysical assumptions. Against this, Markus Gabriel proposes a radical form of ontological pluralism that divorces ontology from metaphysics, understood as the most fundamental theory of absolutely everything. He argues that the concept of existence is (...) incompatible with the existence of the world and therefore proposes his innovative no-world-view. In the context of recent debates surrounding new realism and speculative realism, Gabriel also develops the outlines of a realist epistemological pluralism. His idea here is that there are different forms of knowledge that correspond to the plurality of fields of sense that must be acknowledged in order to avoid the trap of metaphysics. (shrink)

Introduction to New Realism provides an overview of the movement of contemporary thought named New Realism, by its creator and most celebrated practitioner, Maurizio Ferraris. Sharing significant concerns and features with Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, New Realism can be said to be one of the most prescient philosophical positions today. Its desire to overcome the postmodern antirealism of Kantian origin, and to reassert the importance of truth and objectivity in the name of a new (...) Enlightenment, has had an enormous resonance both in Europe and in the US. Introduction to New Realism is the first volume dedicated to exposing this continental movement to an anglophone audience.Featuring a foreword by the eminent contemporary philosopher and leading exponent of Speculative Realism, Iain Hamilton Grant, the book begins by tracing the genesis of New Realism, and outlining its central theoretical tenets, before opening onto three distinct sections. The first, 'Negativity', is a critique of the postmodern idea that the world is constructed by our conceptual schemas, all the more so as we have entered the age of digitality and virtuality. The second thesis, 'positivity', proposes the fundamental ontological assertion of New Realism, namely that not only are there parts of reality that are independent of thought, but these parts are also able to act causally over thought and the human world. The third thesis, 'normativity,' applies New Realism to the sphere of the social world. Finally, an afterword written by two young scholars explains in more detail the relationship between New Realism and other forms of contemporary realism. (shrink)

The overall contention of this paper, conducted through an examination of the idea of a ‘critical direct realism’ as this was developed across the twentieth century first in the thought of Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973) and then in a different form by his son Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), is that such a view, in both its conceptual and sensory representational dimensions, is plausible as a form of direct realism. However, to the extent that the mediating sensory or qualitative dimension (...) was itself conceived by both thinkers in what I characterize as strongly ‘phenomenal realist’ terms, the resulting philosophical commitments were of a kind that most current direct realists would generally not accept, even in cases where they themselves are phenomenal realists (perhaps naïve realists). The various perceiver-dependent forms of that additional, perhaps detachable commitment of most critical realists is likely responsible for the assessment of William Pepperell Montague (1873–1953) and other ‘neo-realists’ that ‘critical realism’ is not really, as advertised by Roy Wood Sellars, a version of direct realism, but ultimately a retreat to indirect realism. However, I argue that in both of its primary conceptual and sensory representational commitments, ‘critical direct realism’ remains a plausible competitor to direct acquaintance versions of direct realism. (shrink)

This paper reports the findings of a case study of recent IACR conferences where subtle, but significant, gender differences in conference participation were observed. It goes on to use notions of gender order, agency and structure, styles and genres to explain the key causal factors that generate these differences. It concludes with some suggestions about how these gender differences could be minimised in future conferences.

_Retraces the history of postmodern philosophy and proposes solutions to overcome its impasses._.

Il vero punto, nel confronto tra realisti e postmodernisti, non è ovviamente l’affermazione o negazione dell’esistenza del mondo esterno, ma il costruzionismo: quanto incidono gli schemi concettuali nella costruzione della realtà naturale e sociale? Infatti nessun realista negherebbe che l’IVA dipenda da schemi concettuali . Quello che il realista si chiede è, appunto, fin dove si spinge l’azione degli schemi concettuali, ed è qui che si manifesta il dissidio tra realisti e postmodernisti. Questi ultimi sono molto più generosi nella lista (...) delle parti di realtà che sono socialmente costruite, al punto da affermare, in taluni casi, che noi non abbiamo mai accesso a un mondo "là fuori”, ma solo con ciò che viene costruito dai nostri schemi concettuali.The actual issue at stake, in the confrontation between realists and postmodernists, is not whether you should accept or deny the existence of the external world, but the scope of constructionism: how far conceptual schemes bear on the construction of natural and social reality? Indeed, no realist would deny that the VAT depends on our conceptual schemes, which does not mean that it is purely subjective: you don’t decide whether you have to pay the VAT, it depends on where the purchase takes places. The realist just asks where the sphere of influence of conceptual schemes stops, and here the disagreement with the postmodernists begins. The latter are much more generous in listing the parts of reality that they consider socially constructed, up to maintaining that we do not have any access to the world “out there”, but only to what our conceptual schemes construct. (shrink)

The legacy of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics includes not only several positions that continue to influence current debate in the field. He also leaves the legacy of an important philosophical tension based in the way he conceives of understanding. On the one hand, Gadamer maintains that genuine understanding remains true to matters themselves. On the other hand, though, he acknowledges that understanding is always mediated by language, and, thereby, meaning inherited from tradition. After a brief consideration of this tension in (...) Gadamer’s thought, the author argues that this tension leads to a divide between two post-Gadamerian approaches in hermeneutics, one postmodern and the other new-realist. Postmodern hermeneutics is shown to give priority to the role played by language in understanding while new-realist hermeneutics is shown to stress the focus of understanding on the matters themselves. The author concludes with a brief consideration of the normative implications of this legacy. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to characterize Maurizio Ferraris’ New Realism as a metaphilosophical account that develops Peter Strawson’s project of a descriptive metaphysics. The paper consists of two sections. The former outlines Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics by highlighting its realist commitments. The latter characterizes New Realism as a way of turning Strawson’s metaphysics into a metaphilosophy. New Realism moves from Strawson’s metaphysical description of the world we share through our experience to the metaphilosophical claim that (...) philosophy should primarily consist in this kind of description. (shrink)

I shall distinguish between two periods of analytic ontology, one semi-idealistic, the other post-idealistic. The former fostered the very idea of a conceptual scheme within which questions of ontology could be formulated and answered in the first place; the latter rejected this idea in favour of the view that ontological inquiry neither presupposes a framework, nor provides the framework for science or everyday speech. Since then, ontology is what it always have been, the systematic study of the most fundamental categories (...) of being, not of thought. Unfortunately, such a category theory becomes aporetic in its search for a solution of the problem of the “temporary intrinsic”. Experience cannot tell us, whether entities persist by “perduring” or by “enduring.” One can take an alternative route and seek to broaden the conceptual basis of ontology by focussing on “Being” in contrast to entities, or being. The controversy on perdurantism and endurantism emerges as a dispute over two conflicting ways of being in time, not of Being itself. (shrink)

If the end of metaphysics is not upon us, then phenomenology must be at an end instead. Or so we are told, at least, by the “new realists,” or at least by some of the thinkers I’ll refer to using this term. And why shouldn’t we agree with them? If there’s anything at all to be said for the line of thinking that they advance, then today, we are at long last licensed to speak about beings once again; but apparently, (...) phenomenology deals only with consciousness, which we must admit—assuming we have a realist bone in our bodies—does not determine beings themselves at all. To persist with the phenomenological method, rather, would be to block all progress in philosophy—or so, again, some of these “new realists” will... (shrink)

El presente ensayo compara un análisis fenomenológico de la propiedad con el nuevo realismo de Maurizio Ferraris. La comparación expone los límites de la perspectiva fenomenológica al mismo tiempo que también muestra los momentos estructurales de su modo de dación: momento intuitivo; momento de la solicitud; momento del reconocimiento; momento de la propiedad. Una vez expuesta la unidad de estos momentos, el ensayo pone de manifiesto cómo la perspectiva del nuevo realismo pensaría la propiedad a través de la nueva ontología (...) del objeto, es decir, como un objeto social vinculado a un acto social. Las conclusiones exponen el carácter fenoménico de la propiedad como condición del análisis fenomenológico, en contraposición al planteamiento de Ferraris, donde la propiedad sería tratada como un objeto. No obstante, ambas perspectivas pensarían la propiedad como un acto vinculado al deseo de apropiación, lo que permite una inves-tigación fenomenológica de la voluntad.The present essay compares a phenomenological study of the property with the new realism of Maurizio Ferraris. The comparison shows the limits of the phenomenological perspective and simultaneously the structural moments of its mode of givenness: the intuitive moment; the moment of the request; the moment of the admission; the moment of the ownership. Once the unity of these moments is exposed, the essay shows how the perspective of the new realism would think the property through a new ontology of the object, that is, as a social object related to a social act. The conclusions expose the phenomenological character of the property as a condition of the phenomenological approach in contrast to the Ferrari’s proposal, where the property would be treated as an object. Nevertheless, both perspectives would think the property as an act related to the wish of appropriation, which allows the phenomenological investigation of the will. (shrink)