Defending Realism

The essays in this volume, first presented at an international conference held at the University of Urbino, Italy, in 2011, explore the different senses of realism, arguing both for and against its distinctive theses and considering these senses from a historical point of view. The first sense is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists does so, and has the properties it has, independently of whether it is the object of a person's thought or perception. The second sense of realism is epistemological, wherein realism claims that, in some cases, it is possible to know the world as it exists in and of itself. A third sense, which has become known as ontological realism, states that universals exist as well as individuals. The essays collected here make new contributions to these fundamental philosophical issues, which have largely defined western analytic philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to the present day.

This book advances a coherent statement of defensive realism as a theory of strategy for our time and adds to our understanding of defensive realism as a grand theory of IR in particular and our understanding of IR in general and contributes to the ongoing debates among major paradigms of international relations.

Ganson offers new hope in this work for the defense of scientific realism by undermining powerful anti-realist objections and advocating an abandonment of naturalist and externalist strategies.

Moral Realism is a systematic defence of the idea that there are objective moral standards. In the tradition of Plato and G. E. Moore, Russ Shafer-Landau argues that there are moral principles that are true independently of what anyone, anywhere, happens to think of them. These principles are a fundamental aspect of reality, just as much as those that govern mathematics or the natural world. They may be true regardless of our ability to grasp them, and their truth is not a matter of their being ratified from any ideal standpoint, nor of being the object of actual or hypothetical consensus, nor of being an expression of our rational nature. Shafer-Landau accepts Plato's and Moore's contention that moral truths are sui generis. He rejects the currently popular efforts to conceive of ethics as a kind of science, and insists that moral truths and properties occupy a distinctive area in our ontology. Unlike scientific truths, the fundamental moral principles are knowable a priori. And unlike mathematical truths, they are essentially normative: intrinsically action-guiding, and supplying a justification for all who follow their counsel. Moral Realism is the first comprehensive treatise defending non-naturalistic moral realism in over a generation. It ranges over all of the central issues in contemporary metaethics, and will be an important source of discussion for philosophers and their students interested in issues concerning the foundations of ethics.

In Defence of Realism is a powerful indictment of the fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics that has shrouded much contemporary literary theory and criticism. Raymond Tallis, one of the most important critics of post-Saussurean literary theory in the English-speaking world, examines the reasons often cited by critics and theorists for believing that realism in fiction is impossible and verisimilitude a mere literary ?effect.? He clearly demonstrates not only that the arguments of critics hostile to realism are invalid, but that even if they were sound, they would apply equally to anti-realist fiction, indeed to all intelligible discourse.

Scientific realism is the optimistic view that modern science is on the right track: that the world really is the way our best scientific theories describe it . In his book, Stathis Psillos gives us a detailed and comprehensive study which restores the intuitive plausibility of scientific realism. We see that throughout the twentieth century, scientific realism has been challenged by philosophical positions from all angles: from reductive empiricism, to instrumentalism and to modern sceptical empiricism. Scientific Realism explains that the history of science does not undermine the arguments for scientific realism, but instead makes it reasonable to accept scientific realism as the best philosophical account of science, its empirical success, its progress and its practice. Anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the state of modern science and why scientific realism is plausible, should read this book.

The essays in this volume, first presented at an international conference held at the University of Urbino, Italy, in 2011, explore the different senses of realism, arguing both for and against its distinctive theses and considering these senses from a historical point of view. The first sense is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists does so, and has the properties it has, independently of whether it is the object of a person's thought or perception. The second sense of realism is epistemological, wherein realism claims that, in some cases, it is possible to know the world as it exists in and of itself. A third sense, which has become known as ontological realism, states that universals exist as well as individuals. The essays collected here make new contributions to these fundamental philosophical issues, which have largely defined western analytic philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to the present day.

The scope of this study is both ambitious and modest. One of its ambitions is to reintegrate Hegel's theory of knowledge into main stream epist~ology. Hegel's views were formed in consideration of Classical Skepticism and Modern epistemology, and he frequently presupposes great familiarity with other views and the difficulties they face. Setting Hegel's discussion in the context of both traditional and contemporary epistemology is therefore necessary for correctly interpreting his issues, arguments, and views. Accordingly, this is an issues-oriented study. I analyze Hegel's problematic and method by placing them in the context of Sextus Empiricus, Descartes, Kant, Carnap, and William Alston. I discuss Carnap, rather than a Modern empiricist such as Locke or Hume, for several reasons. One is that Hegel himself refutes a fundamental presupposition of Modern empiricism, the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance," in the first chapter of the Phenomenology, a chapter that cannot be reconstructed within the bounds of this study.