Word Finder - realism

definition

A concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary.

definition

An artistic representation of reality as it is.

definition

The viewpoint that an external reality exists independent of observation.

definition

A doctrine that universals are real—they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate them.

His realism enables him to maintain the reality of Time, and so of the process of the world's redemption.

Hamilton (Discussions, p. 197) allows greater sagacity to Collier than to Berkeley, on the ground that he did not vainly attempt to enlist men's natural belief against the hypothetical realism of the philosophers.

Finally the theory defined is opposed to all forms of realism, whether in the older form which sought to reduce mind to a function of matter, or in any of the newer forms which seek for the ultimate essence of both mind and matter in some unknown force or energy which, while in itself it is neither, yet contains the potentiality of both.

In this list are included of course all shades of opinion, from extreme Nominalism to extreme Realism.

Maurice, whose character, marked by " religious realism," sought in the past " the witness to eternal truths, the manifestation by time-samples of infinite realities and unchanging relations";4 and Charles Kingsley, " a great teacher," though one " certain to go astray the moment he becomes didactic."

Latin poetry is more rich in the expression of personal feeling than of dramatic realism.

This then is his transfigured realism, which, as far as what is known goes, is idealism, but as far as what exists goes, realism - of a sort.

The school undoubtedly tends towards realism.

They are all very impressed with the realism in the game.

Aristotle, the founder of metaphysics as a distinct science, was also the founder of metaphysical realism, and still remains its main authority.

At the present day realism is despised on the ground that its differentiation of body and soul, natural and supernatural, ignores the unity of being.

The principles of the great orthodox philosophers of the later scholastic period which begins in the 13th century, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, were those of moderate realism.

Hence the stress laid on will as the realizing factor, in opposition to thought, a view through which Schelling connects himself with Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, and on the ground of which he has been recognized by the latter as the reconciler of idealism and realism.

Metaphysical realism is the intermediate view that everything known is either body or soul, neither of which alone exhausts the universe of being.

Moreover, there is no real opposition between monism and dualism, for there can very well be one kind of being, without being all body or all soul; and as a matter of fact, Aristotelian realism is both a monism of substance and a dualism of body and soul.

We cannot, therefore, agree with many recent idealists who regard Leibnitz as one of themselves, though it is true that, when stripped of its realism, his metaphysics easily passed into the metaphysical idealisms of Lotze and of Fechner.

This third position isarelic of ancient metaphysical realism; although it must be remembered that Kant does not go to the length of Descartes and Locke, who supposed that from mere ideas we could know bodies and souls, but suggests that beneath the phenomena of outer and inner sense the thing in itself may not be heterogeneous (ungleichartig).

Fichte now set himself in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) to make transcendental idealism into a system of metaphysical idealism without Kant's inconsistencies and relics of realism.

Here he was for the first time grappling with a fundamental difficulty in metaphysical idealism which is absent from realism, namely, the difficulty of explaining the identity of a thing, e.g.

The cause Of this anachronism has been the failure of intuitive realism and the domination of idealism, which makes short-sighted men suppose that at all events they must begin with the psychology and the psychological idealism of the day, in the false hope that on the sands of psychological idealism they may build a house of metaphysical realism.

He describes it as idealism in the form of ideal realism, because it recognizes an ideating will requiring substance as substratum or matter for outer relations of phenomena.

Wundt, however, afterwards wrote an Einleitung in die Philosophic (1901; 4th ed., 1906), in which he speaks of realism in the form of ideal realism as the philosophy of the future.

It is not to be idealism which resolves everything into spirit, but realism which gives the spiritual and the material each its own place in harmony with scientific consciousness.

It is true that Spencer's " transfigured realism" contains much that was not dreamt of by Hume.

He develops this belief in an absolute in connexion with his own theory of evolution into something different both from the idealism of Hume and the realism of Hamilton, and rather falling under the head of materialism.

The " antirealism," which takes the lion's share in " transfigured realism," is simply a development of the phenomenalism of Hume.

It was counteracted to some extent by the study at the universities of the deductive logic of Aristotle and the inductive logic of Bacon, by parts of Mill's own logic, and by the natural realism of Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton, which met Hume's scepticism by asserting a direct perception of the external world.

But natural realism, as finally interpreted by Hamilton, was too dogmatic, too unsystematic, and too confused with elements derived from Kantian idealism to withstand the brilliant criticism of Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), a work which for a time almost persuaded us that Nature as we know it from sensations is nothing but permanent possibilities of sensation, and oneself only a series of states of consciousness.

His theory of "attuition," by which he supposes that we become conscious of objects outside ourselves, is his " return to dualism," and is indeed so like natural realism as to suggest that, like Ferrier, he starts from Hamilton to end in Hegel.

In fact, his dualism is not realism, but merely the distinction of subject and object within idealism.

The point of true realism is Aristotle's point that the world consists of such distinct, though related, things, and therefore of substances, natural and supernatural.

Again, the method of true realism is that of Aristotle, and consists in recognizing the independence of metaphysics.

At the same time, while the independence of metaphysics leads us to metaphysical realism, this is not to deny the value of psychology, still less of logic. Besides the duty of determining what we know, there is the duty of determining how we know it.

But their psychological method and idealism produced another mistake - the tendency to a modicum of realism, as much as seemed to this or that author to follow from psychological idealism.

In Germany, since the victory of Kant over Wolff, realism has always been in difficulties, which we can appreciate when we reflect that the Germans by preference apply the term " realism " to the paradoxes of Herbart (1776-1841), who, in order to avoid supposed contradictions, supposed that bodies are not substances, but show (Schein), while " reals" are simple substances, each with a simple quality, and all preserving themselves against disturbance by one another, whether physically or psychologically, but not known to be either material or spiritual because we do not know the simple quality in which the nature of the real consists.

Gunther (1783-1863), " Cartesius correctus," erected too mystical an edifice on the psychological basis of Descartes to sustain a satisfactory realism.

But German realism lacks critical power, and is little better than a weed overshadowed by the luxuriant forest of German idealism.

In France, the home of Cartesian realism, after the vicissitudes of sensationalism and materialism, which became connected in French the French mind with the Revolution, the spirit of Descartes revived in the 19th century in the spiritualistic realism of Victor Cousin.

But Cousin's psychological method of proceeding from consciousness outwards, and the emphasis laid by him on spirit in comparison with body, prevented a real revival of realism.

So far this ontological triplicity is realism.

But when we examine his theory of the non-ego, and find that it resolves matter into active force and this into animated activity, identifies law with reason, and calls God absolute substance, we see at once that this spiritual realism is not very far from idealism.

Janet accepted the traditional ontological triplicity - God, souls and bodies - and, in answer to Ravaisson, who called this realism " demi-spiritualisme," rejoined that he was content to accept the title.

The psychological metaphysics of Cousin and of Janet was, however, too flimsy a realism to withstand its passage into this very idealism of matter which has become the dominant French metaphysics.

These examples are enough to show that the psychological metaphysics of spiritual realism has not been able to withstand the rise and progress of spiritual idealism in France.

Moreover, he and his successors mixed up so many accidents with the essence of their realism that the whole system broke down under its own weight.

It also contained much that was doubtful, and much that was ill-adapted to the metaphysics of realism.

While it asserted a realism of individuals, it admitted a conceptualism of universals.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this Kantism, he adhered to his natural realism.

He has the merit of presenting natural or intuitive realism in its purity.

Intuitive Realism is to be replaced by Physical Realism.