Realism

About: Realism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 175785 citations.

Wittgenstein, mathematics, and ethics

Abstract: A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. - Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. (PI, 122) How does Wittgenstein's later thought bear on moral philosophy? Wittgenstein himself having said so little about this, philosophers have been free to take his ideas and methods to have the most various implications for ethics. I shall in this essay be concerned with Wittgenstein's ideas about mathematics and some possible ways of seeing their suggestiveness for ethics. I shall bring those ideas into critical contact with a rich and thoughtful treatment of ethics, that of Sabina Lovibond in Realism and Imagination in Ethics. She defends a form of moral realism which she takes to be derived from Wittgenstein (RIE, p. 25); and her work is thus of great interest if we are concerned not only with questions about how Wittgenstein's work bears on ethics but also with questions about the relation between his thought and debates about realism. Wittgenstein is misread, I think, when taken either as a philosophical realist or as an antirealist. Elsewhere I have argued against antirealist readings. One aim of this present essay is to trace to its sources a realist reading of Wittgenstein - its sources in the difficulty of looking at, and taking in, the use of our words. The clearest unchanging feature of the course over the decades was the opening question: How does the Investigations begin? Against even the brief, varying introductory remarks I would provide - all omitted here - concerning Wittgenstein's life and his place in twentieth- century philosophy, in which I emphasized the remarkable look and sound of Wittgenstein's text and related this to issues of modernism in the major arts, the opening question was meant to invoke the question: How does philosophy begin? And how does the Investigations account for its beginning (hence philosophy's) as it does? And since this is supposed to be a work of philosophy (but how do we tell this?), how does it (and must it? but can it?) account for its look and sound?

The Form of the Sentimental Novel

Abstract: Most discussions of sentimental literature, taking their lead from Goldsmith's "Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy," center on matters of content and atmosphere-especially the prevalence of tears, whether those of the characters or the audience. But sentiment on stage is not equivalent to sentiment in the novel, nor can the most striking formal characteristics of the fiction being written in the 1760's and 1770's be illuminated by invocations of such philosophic doctrines as Shaftesbury's benevolism. Through a discussion of the form of sentimental fiction, I would like to suggest that such works as Tristram Shandy, The Man of Feeling, and The Sorrows of Young Werther were neither the resurgence of a cultural stream that had somehow gone underground for almost half a century, nor part of an essentially discontinuous novelistic tradition. They show instead both a structural and a thematic continuity with earlier eighteenthcentury novelists, and with the work of Pope and Swift, that is more central to the best of sentimental literature than any continuity with the themes, plot turns, and moral atmosphere of late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century drama. A convenient foil to my view is the frequent assertion, however qualified, that the form of the novel had become so established in the little more than twenty-five years between Pamela and Tristram Shandy that Sterne could already freely experiment with all the givens of the "well-made" novel, including its typographical conventions. In this literary-historical commonplace, formal balance and circumstantial realism are the assumed standards; sentiment, gothidsm, and Sterne are the deviations, to be explained more by reference to the history of ideas than the history of the novel. At best the change is explained as a "revolt against realism": the critic defines sub-genres and asks us to sit back and wait for Jane Austen. But I would like to argue that Sterne, among others, is not upending but extending the essential self-definition of the novel in England, and I would like to show how a literary form whose first appearance trailed banners of fidelity to real life and moral correctness could metamorphose into Sterne's elaborate formal games and the "discovered" manuscripts of Walpole and Mackenzie. Structure in the sentimental novel strives to imitate feeling rather than intellect, and to embody direct experience rather than artistic premeditation; this basic imperative of the novel from Defoe on is only made a little more apparent in the works of Sterne, Mackenzie, and others. The form of the sentimental novel, the gothic novel, and eighteenth-century fiction in general never seriously imitates such non-literary fictions as the order of providence, philosophic system, or social hierarchy, no matter how it may comment on them or include their patterns

International Relations Then and Now: Origins and Trends in Interpretation

Abstract: This comprehensive textbook charts the development of international relations as an academic discipline, from its foundations to the present day. The book first examines how great thinkers of the past considered relations between political and social units. It then looks at the emergence of the discipline which sought to explain the state system that had appeared in the seventeenth century. International relations "then" studies the conceptual worlds of eighteenth and nineteenth century theorists and practitioners. There follows the first of the great debates in the field, that between idealism and realism, which ended up with a consensus for the latter. The second part of the book looks at contemporary theory - how realism was challenged and then resurged - how world society and structuralist approaches are now well-established, and how what has been an Anglo-American discipline is poised now to become a genuinely global field.

Exploring visual culture : definitions, concepts, contexts

Abstract: Introduction 1 Visual Culture and the Meanings of Culture 2 Definitions of Art and the Art World 3 Concepts of Craft 4 Design and Modern Culture 5 Fashion: Style, Identity and Meaning 6 Photography and Film 7 Architecture and Visual Culture 8 Representation and the Idea of Realism 9 Visual Rhetoric 10 The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Author 11 The Ideology of the Visual 12 Visual Practices in the Age of Industry 13 Technical Reproduction and Its Significance 14 From Mass Media to Cyberculture 15 Visual Culture and Its Institutions

Structuralism as a form of scientific realism

Abstract: Structural realism has recently re‐entered mainstream discussions in the philosophy of science. The central notion of structure, however, is contested by both advocates and critics. This paper briefly reviews currently prominent structuralist accounts en route to proposing a metaphysics of structure that is capable of supporting the epistemic aspirations of realists, and that is immune to the charge most commonly levelled against structuralism. This account provides an alternative to the existing epistemic and ontic forms of the position, incorporating elements of both. Structures are here identified with relations between first order, causal properties: properties that confer specific dispositions for relations. This form of structuralism constitutes an explicit proposal for what seem implicit structuralist tendencies in sophisticated but more traditional characterizations of realism. An outline of the proposal's response to the anti‐realist's pessimistic induction on the history of scientific theories i...