Realism

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

Realism and anti-realism

Abstract: Questions about the plausibility and character of realism and its alternatives are at the heart of all metaphysical disputes today. However it is not a straightforward matter to know when some contentious realm of entities is real, or to understand and appreciate what is at issue between those on either side of the dispute. This book aims to make clear what is really at stake in the contemporary realism debate. The first part of the book examines the realist and anti-realist debate abstracted away from any particular application of it. The authors explain local realism and anti-realism and look at the motivations that might support one position over the other with regard to a particular subject matter. In addition, they examine particular types of global anti-realism – idealism, Kantianism, verificationism – and show how each is motivated by intricate combinations of semantic, epistemological and metaphysical reasons. In the second part of the book the authors explore how the ideas outlined in Part 1 can and have been applied to different subject matters. They examine the respective cases for realism and anti-realism about colours, morality, science, mathematics, modality, and fiction. The authors show that the realism and anti-realism debates within various different domains are much more unified than we are often led to believe, and that a comparison of the realism debates in different areas can give us an appreciation of the need for a kind of consistency in our views that is often lacking. Realism and Anti-Realism offers readers a clear introduction to a subject central to contemporary work in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language.

Realism, Culture and Grand Strategy: Explaining America's Peculiar Path to World Power

Abstract: When and why do states adopt new grand strategies? According to a “neoclassical realist” model, changes in international conditions are the chief cause of long-term adjustments in grand strategy, while domestic political-military cultures help specify the precise grand strategies chosen by state officials. What results are outcomes that appear surprising or skewed from a realist perspective. I test the neoclassical realist model against the cases of u.s. strategic adjustment in 1918–1921 as well as 1945–1948 and find that the long-term trajectory of America's rise to world power is best explained by international pressures. The precise strategies chosen in each period, however, were heavily influenced by American political-military culture. The implication is that theoretically inclusive forms of realism can provide convincing explanations for changes in grand strategy; furthermore, states can remain somewhat “differentiated” in terms of their foreign policy behavior, for cultural reasons, and in spite of...

Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics: Resisting the Attractions of Realism

Abstract: 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 chapter 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 anti-realist. Elsewhere I have argued against anti-realist readings. One aim of this present chapter 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. At the heart of Sabina Lovibond's account of ethics is a contrast between two philosophical approaches to language. Here is a summary of the approach she rejects, which she refers to as the empiricist view. Language, on that view, is an “ instrument for the communication of thought,” thought being logically prior (RIE, p. 17); the language used in description is conceived of as like a calculus, and descriptive propositions are thought of as “readable” from the facts via determinate rules (RIE, pp. 18–19, 21). The meaning of descriptive terms (and thus the truth-conditions of propositions capable of truth and falsity) is tied to sense experience (RIE, p. 19). Reality is the reality described by the natural sciences; only entities admitted by science are real entities (RIE, p. 20). The “empiricist” view allows for two sorts of judgment, judgments of fact and judgments of value, corresponding to activities of recognition of facts (on the basis ultimately of sense experience) and affective responses to facts. There is thus also, on this view, a distinction between two sorts of meaning: descriptive or cognitive meaning and evaluative or emotive meaning (RIE, p. 21).

How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia

Abstract: "A gripping, unsettling, and highly original book that turns the making of a Soviet socialist-realist classic--Azhaev's Far from Moscow--into a detective story, and sheds as strange and ambiguous a light on the Stalin era, from gulag to Writers' Union, as one could hope for. Lahusen is a disarmingly low-key scholarly virtuoso who performs simultaneously as an archive-based historian, an interpreter of texts (including Azhaev's own self-organized archive), and a gently relentless biographer whose stalking of his prey is reminiscent of Nabokov. The final chilling paragraph typically economical and understated, is a reminder that the author/investigator, too, is a collaborator in the multiple reworkings of Azhaev's text, and of his life, that How Life Writes the Book has so finely analyzed."--Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago "This is a wonderfully original work: a history of a book, a literary analysis of an age, a montage of a life. Lahusen writes with a postmodern sensibility but without the postmodernist jargon."--Yuri Slezkine, University of California, Berkeley "Thomas Lahusen has written an imaginative and archivally grounded book that presents the most fascinating picture to date of the literary process that produced canonical works of Socialist Realism and the people who wrote them. How Life Writes the Book is alternatingly chilling and funny as it demonstrates the interpenetration of literary institutions, massive construction projects and the Soviet system of prison camps and slave labor. With this study, as with his earlier Intimacy and Terror, Lahusen continues his own project of revolutionizing our understanding of the Soviet subject and Soviet subjectivity."--Eric Naiman, University of California, Berkeley "Lahusen's case study marks a new genre of inquiry into the very nature of socialist realism, a genre which became possible after archives and memory in Russia regained their voice. It shows how life is transformed into Soviet myth."--Hans Gnther, editor of The Culture of the Stalin Period

Gender and Critical Realism: A Critique of Sayer

Abstract: In a recent article in this journal, Andrew Sayer has argued that much feminist research on the gendered nature of organisations, such as bureaucracy and the market, confuses a contingent association of gender and organisational forms with a stronger claim that they are intrinsically gendered. Sayer accepts that this research has shown that the empirically found, concrete forms of organisations are gendered. However, deeper theoretical reflection, he suggests, reveals that, when considered as `abstract realist models', bureaucracy and the market are, in fact, identity-blind. He makes two claims, one concerned with explanation, the other concerned with the political consequences of social inquiry. The first is that the construction of abstract models, rather than the `associational' thinking concerned with the delineation of empirical regularities, is necessary to the proper understanding of the operation of causal mechanisms and their mode of determination in social life. The second is that this will enable a more progressive and positive politics beyond a fatalism which he attributes to associational thinking. This paper takes issue with both claims arguing that the abstract theory he defends has no positive role in social inquiry and that his political critique is misplaced.