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Main description: The essays collected in this volume explore the fundamental issues of philosophical realism, including metaphysical realism: Do things exist and have properties independently of being objects of thought or perception? epistemological realism: Is it possible to know any part of reality in and of itself? and ontological realism: Are there universals? This book provides a welcome resource for philosophers and for advanced philosophy students.

The major objective of this publication is to trace the formation of the term "realism" both in the plastic arts and European artistic culture in general. The need for such an analysis is determined by the current terminology applied to various phenomena in the history of European art, which results in a large degree of ambiguity with respect to the conceptual range. Although the origins of the concept "realism" date back to the scholastic religious philosophy of the Middle Ages, its application in Art Studies has entirely different backgrounds and can actually be traced back to the middle of the 19th century. As far as the Western European art is concerned, this concept is first used with respect to the artistic works by Courbet. In the history of the Russian Art in general and art criticism in particular, the term is commonly used with reference to the emergence and development of the "Natural School" literary movement.
At the same time, a thorough analysis of, inter alia, the epistolary and artistic-critical legacy of the leading figures of the Russian culture in the middle and the second half of the 19th century, such as Belinsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Stasov, and others, explicitly reveals a rather early application of this term, but mainly in the field of literary rather than artistic criticism. This situation can be explained by the total predominance of literary centrism in the 19th century Russian Art, which, in its turn, was determined by the specific aspects of our country's social and political development. The explicit translation of this concept into the plastic arts domain was at the same time associated with the use of terminological qualifiers such as "critical", "didactic", and "socialist" with respect to the word realism, which resulted in even greater conceptual ambiguity. There is no doubt that the analysis of historical formation and that of characteristics of the figurative-plastic system of realism as a creative method should finally be subject to a comprehensive review, which can allow avoiding its excessively broad terminological interpretation.

Realism and truth -- Theologies of identity and truth : legacies of barth and tillich -- Barth and Tillich on theology : narrative and system -- Legacies of narrative and system -- Truth, identity, and authority -- Truth in theology -- Roots of the evasion of truth and their antidotes -- Liberal theology as a near miss -- Theology as symbolic engagement -- Metaphysics for theology -- Realism and contextualization -- Postliberalism and theological inquiry -- Religious symbols : engagement -- Religious symbols : interpretation -- All truth is contextual -- The comparative context for religious truth -- How to read scriptures for religious truth -- Scriptures for engagement -- Imaginative differences -- Symbolic interpretation -- Criteria for reading scriptures for truth -- Systematic theology in a global public -- System and its public : three values -- Truth and realism -- Minimizing arbitrariness -- Vulnerability in a global public -- Realism in pragmatism -- A peircean theory of religious interpretation -- Engagement and reference -- Reference and apophatic theology -- Meaning and truth -- Interpretation -- The contributions of Charles S. Peirce to philosophy of religion 1- The evolutionary weight of religion -- Contributions to theology -- Comparative theology -- The importance of erudition -- Intuition : a platonizing of pragmatism -- Intuition and immediate unity -- A theory of harmony -- Judgment and interpretation -- Intuition and Plato's divided line -- Whitehead and pragmatism -- The entangled legacies of pragmatism and process philosophy -- Tensions regarding time and continuity -- Eternity and time -- Creation, eternity, time, and continuity -- Philosophy of nature in american theology -- Jonathan Edwards -- Ralph Waldo Emerson -- The pragmatists -- Alfred North Whitehead -- Realism in religion and metaphysics -- Concepts of God in comparative theology -- Conceptions of god in comparison -- Theoretical issues in comparison -- Observations about ultimacy -- An hypothesis about the respect in which concepts of ultimacy interpret reality -- Some contemporary theories of divine creation -- Classifications of conceptions of God -- Process theology -- Ground-of-being theologies -- Piety and conceptions of God -- Descartes and Leibniz on the priority of nature versus will in God -- Texts and arguments -- Transcendence and immanence -- Tillich and Hartshorne as Descartes and Leibniz -- Experience and reason -- The metaphysical sense in which life is eternal -- Introduction : immortality and eternal life -- Time and eternity : a metaphysical analysis -- Eternity in the divine life of God -- Eternity and time in human life

The prospects for moral realism and ethical naturalism have been important parts of recent debates within metaethics. As a first approximation,moral realismis the claim that there are facts or truths about moral matters that are objective in the sense that they obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers.Ethical naturalismis the claim that moral properties of people, actions, and institutions are natural, rather than occult or supernatural, features of the world. Though these metaethical debates remain unsettled, several people, myself included, have tried to defend the plausibility of both moral realism and ethical naturalism. I, among others, have appealed to recent work in the philosophy of language—in particular, to so-called theories of "direct reference" —to defend ethical naturalism against a variety of semantic worries, including G. E. Moore's "open question argument." In response to these arguments, critics have expressed doubts about the compatibility of moral realism and direct reference. In this essay, I explain these doubts, and then sketch the beginnings of an answer—but understanding both the doubts and my answer requires some intellectual background.

A full understanding of political realism is needed, Kenneth Thompson writes in the preface of his recent study, "if American statesmen and scholars are to advance public understanding and awareness of the realities of international life and close the gap between what leaders feel and do and what the people imagine they do. Therefore the central aim I have had in mind is a careful explication, first, of the origins of political realism as an approach to American foreign policy, and, secondly, of its implications for the major unsolved problems of America's relations with the rest of the world" (p. vii).

ALTHOUGH POLITICAL REALISM IS OFTEN UNDERSTOOD AS A MORE OR LESS HOMOGENEOUS TRADITION FIXED ON CERTAIN ESSENTIAL CONCEPTS, JOHN HERZ'S PROVOCATIVE PIECE PROMPTS AN ATTEMPT TO EXAMINE REALIST SCHOLARSHIP IN A WAY THAT REVEALS SOME DEEP ANTINOMIES: SOME INTERNAL TENSIONS THAT MAKE REALIST SCHOLARSHIP AN OPEN-ENDED DIALOGUE.

This paper outlines an account of political realism as a form of ideology critique. We defend the normative edge of this critical-theoretic project against the common charge that there is a problematic trade-off between a theory's groundedness in facts about the political status quo and its ability to envisage radical departures from the status quo. To overcome that problem, we combine insights from theories of legitimacy by Bernard Williams and other realists, Critical Theory, and analytic epistemological and metaphysical theories of cognitive bias, ideology and social construction. The upshot is an account of realism as empirically informed critique of social and political phenomena. We reject a sharp divide between descriptive and normative theory, and so provide an alternative to the anti-empiricism of some approaches to Critical Theory as well as to the complacency towards existing power structures found within liberal realism, let alone mainstream normative political philosophy, liberal or otherwise.

This book investigates a number of central problems in the philosophy of Charles Peirce grouped around the realism of his semiotics: the issue of how sign systems are developed and used in the investigation of reality. Thus, it deals with the precise character of Peirce's realism; with Peirce's special notion of propositions as signs which, at the same time, denote and describe the same object. It deals with diagrams as signs which depict more or less abstract states-of-affairs, facilitating reasoning about them; with assertions as public claims about the truth of propositions. It deals with iconicity in logic, the issue of self-control in reasoning, dependences between phenomena in their realist descriptions. A number of chapters deal with applied semiotics: with biosemiotic sign use among pre-human organisms: the multimedia combination of pictorial and linguistic information in human semiotic genres like cartoons, posters, poetry, monuments. All in all, the book makes a strong case for the actual relevance of Peirce's realist semiotics

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Preface and acknowledgements -- Introduction: critical realism, Marxism and education -- 1 Marxism: philosophy, science and revolution -- 2 Western Marxism: from Marx to Marxism -- 3 The old and the new: stirring from the long calm -- 4 Critical realist tools for Marxism and education -- 5 The problem of naturalism -- 6 The problem of structure and agency -- Conclusion: critical realism for revolutionising practice -- Index.

This paper explores contemporary debates about the meaning and value of realism in political theory. I seek to move beyond the widespread observation that realism encompasses a diverse set of critiques and commitments, by urging that we recognize two key strands in recent realist thought. Detachment realists claim that political theory is excessively abstract and infeasible and thereby fails adequately to inform actual political decision-making. Displacement critics, on the other hand, suggest that political theory threatens or disrespects real politics. Not only are these visions of realism very different, there are also important tensions between them. I focus, in particular, on clarifying and evaluating the more complex charge that political theory displaces politics. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]