Revival Of Realism Research Articles

The Revival of Realism and the Study of Religions

The Revival of Realism and the Study of Religions

Smashing the state gently: Radical realism and realist anarchism

The revival of realism in political theory has included efforts to challenge realism’s conservative reputation and argue that radical forms are possible. Nonetheless these efforts have been criticised as insufficient to overcome realism’s inherent conservatism. This article argues that radical forms of realism can be better appreciated by considering the application of the realist perspective within an existing radical ideology: anarchism. This may seem an unusual choice, considering anarchism’s standard representation as naïvely idealistic and paradigmatically non-realist. However, attention to the breadth of diversity in anarchist theory reveals a collection of positions that together represent a ‘realist anarchism’ which not only challenges anarchism’s reputation as uniformly committed to unrealistic and idealistic utopianism but also demonstrates the existence of genuinely radical forms of realism.

International Relations—Still an American Social Science?: Toward Diversity in International Thought. Edited by Robert M. A. Crawford and Darryl S. L. Jarvis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 394p. $88.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Early accounts of the development of the discipline of international relations (IR) attribute causal significance to changes in the “real” world. In this respect, historigraphy was a reflection in history's looking glass, such that World War I created idealism, and World War II prompted the revival of realism. The editors of International Relations—Still and American Social Science? remind us that the identity of the discipline is also a reflection of geopolitical and cultural circumstances. The sixteen essays seek to reawaken the question of the identity of the discipline and how this has been transmitted and contested. There is no doubt that the book will be widely read and is likely to find its way onto many postgraduate course lists. It is also likely to find critics and supporters in fairly equal number, which is reason alone to applaud the labors of the editors.

A Preface to Logic The Revival of Realism : Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

THESE two books both advocate logical realism, as opposed to the conceptualism or nominalism which has been fashionable in Western thought since the fourteenth century. Undoubtedly universals are concepts, but concepts are not generic images, as Prof. Cohen points out ; nor are universals merely concepts if they play their parts successfully. Undoubtedly names are special kinds of universals, but to say that universals are merely names is to make knowledge illusory. A Preface to Logic By Morris R. Cohen. Pp. xix + 202. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1946.) 8s. 6d. net. The Revival of Realism : Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy By James Feibleman. Pp. vii + 333. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1946.) 22s. net.

The Revival of Realism. Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

The Revival of Realism. Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

The Revival of Realism: Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy.

The Revival of Realism: Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy.

The Revival of Realism.

The Revival of Realism.

The Revival of Realism: Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy," by James Feibleman

The Revival of Realism: Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy," by James Feibleman

A Variety of Topics: The Revival of Realism: Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

"A Variety of Topics: The Revival of Realism: Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy." The Journal of Higher Education, 18(7), pp. 390–391

Reid and the Origins of Modern Realism

The popularity of the ontological theory of realism, which has included so many philosophers of major as well as of minor importance, leads to speculations concerning the historical occasions which have prompted its revival. For a long while, realism has been a term so much abused that it might be well to define the particular meaning to be employed here. Realism is the doctrine that universals and values have their being independent of knowing subjects, of the whole knowledge relation, and of all other actuality. Among recent adherents to the doctrine designated as realism' may be included the names of the British realists: Whitehead, S. Alexander, the early Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, G. Dawes Hicks, and John Laird; the Americans Peirce, W. M. Urban, and P. Jordan, among others; and the German, Nicolai Hartmann. I shall for present purposes also include as realists those who deny the independent status for values while admitting it for universals, thus allowing the inclusion of the American neo-realists, although the justification for such a broadening of the definition is questionable. But this by no means exhausts the list of realists. They are to be found among physical scientists, as for instance, Max Planck; among pure mathematicians, as for instance, G. H. Hardy; and among symbolic logicians, as for instance, George Boole; and in many other fields. Realism is an ancient doctrine, having been part of the classical Chinese and Indian philosophy as well as of the philosophy of the classic Greeks and the scholastics. It is the thesis of this paper that while Plato's influence, to say nothing of that of Duns Scotus, has undoubtedly been a general factor in the revival of realism in modern times, a more specific occasion for its vogue in modern Britain and America can be discovered in the development of European philosophy. The metaphysical influences of the Renaissance and Reformation were the results of a late medieval tendency toward nominalism, not merely carried forward in abstract form from the views of Roseellinus and Ockham,

Prof. J. Chevalier

PROF. JACQUES CHEVALIER, dean of the Faculty of Letters and professor of philosophy in the University of Grenoble, is to deliver a series of lectures in London, Cambridge and the north of England. He will speak at the Aquinas Society (Lecture Hall, Inner Temple) on Tuesday, October 24, at 8 p.m. on the “Revival of Realism in French Philosophy”. On Wednesday, October 25, he will be the guest of honour at a luncheon given by the Philosophical Society at the Lyceum Club. On Thursday, October 26, at 5.30 p.m. he will lecture on “Descartes” at University College, Gower Street, London; and on the following Saturday at 3 p.m. he will speak on the “Problem of Survival” at the Institut Frangais (3 Cromwell Gardens, S.W.7). Prof. Chevalier has many friends in England where he has often been at the invitation of the Universities of Oxford and of London or as a delegate to learned congresses. His first visit in England was in 1904, when he came over to study, returning to France with a remarkable monograph on the religious revival in Wales. This brilliant work, with which he began his philosophical career, was soon followed by a penetrating study on the notion of necessity in Aristotle's philosophy. But he is better known in Great Britain by his three monographs on Descartes, Pascal and Bergson, which he has written since he has held the chair of philosophy in the University of Grenoble. He shows how their doctrines affect present-day problems, and gives an original interpretation of them.