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Introduction
Realism, at it simplest and most general, is the view
that entities of a certain type have an objective reality, a
reality that is completely ontologically independent of our
conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Thus,
entities (including abstract conceptsand universals as
well as more concrete objects) have an existence
independent of the act of perception, and independent of
their names.
The doctrine had its beginnings with Pre-
Socratic philosophers
like Thales, Heraclitus and Parmenides, but its definitive
formulation was that of Plato and his theory of Forms (see
the section on Platonic Realism below).
Later philosophers (especially
Christians) amended and adapted the doctrine to suit their
needs:
 St. Augustine modified Plato's realism by holding that universals
existed before the material universe in God's creative mind,
and that humanity as a universal preceded individual men (thus
explaining away problematical theological concepts such as the
transmission of original sin in the human race, and the oneness of
the Trinity).
 St. Anselm believed that he could derive truth about what actually
exists from consideration of an ideal or universal, and argued that
because God is the greatest of beings, he must exist in reality as
well as in thought (for if he existed in thought only,
a greater being could be conceived of).
 St. Thomas Aquinas built on Aristotle's watered down Realism (see
the section on Moderate Realism below) to argue that human
reason could not totally grasp God's being, but that one could
 use reason in theology whenever it was concerned with
the connection between universals and individual objects.

It is a concept which has

repercussions throughout philosophy -
in Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics,
Philosophy
of Perception, Science, Mathematics, Religion, Law, etc
- and it is as contentious today as it was for the Ancient
Greeks.
Realism is contrasted with Anti-Realism (any
position denyingthe objective reality of entities) and
with Nominalism (the position that abstract concepts, general
terms or universals have no independent existence, but
exist only as names) and with Idealism (the position that
the mind is all that exists, and that the external world is
an illusion created by the mind).
There are many different types and degrees of Realism,
some of which are described in detail in the sections below,
and other which are touched on in brief in the Other Types
of Realism section below.
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Platonic Realism
Platonic Realism is the view, articulated by the ancient
Greek philosopher Plato, that universals exist. A universal is
a property of an object, which can exist in more than one
place at the same time (e.g. the quality of "redness"). As
universals were considered by Plato to be ideal forms, this
stance is confusingly also called Platonic Idealism.
The problem of universals is an ancient problem
(introduced by Pre-Socratic philosophers
like Thales, Heraclitus and Parmenides) about what
is signified by common nouns and adjectives, such as "man",
"tree", "white", etc. What is the logical and existential
status of the "thing" that these words refer to? Is it in fact
a thing, or a concept? Is it something existing in reality,
external to the mind, or not? If so, then is it
something physical or something abstract? Is
it separate from material objects, or a part of them in some
way? How can one thing in general be many things
in particular?
Plato's solution is that universals do indeed exist,
although not in the same way that ordinary physical
objects exist, but in a sort of ghostly mode of
existence, outside of space and time, but not at any spatial or
temporal distance from people's bodies. Thus, people
cannot see or otherwise come into sensory contact with
universals, and it is meaningless to apply the categories of
space and time to them, but they can nevertheless
be conceived of and exist.
One type of universal defined by Plato is the Form, which is
not a mental entity at all, but rather
an idea or archetype or original model of which particular
objects, properties and relations are copies. The "forms"
(small "f") or appearances that we see, according to Plato, are
not real, but literally mimic the real "Forms" (capital "F").
Forms are capable of being instantiated by one or many
different particulars, which are essentially
material copies of the Forms - the particulars are said
to "participate" in the Forms, and the Forms are said
to "inhere" in the particulars.
According to Plato, Platonic Forms possess the highest and
most fundamental kind of reality. They are perfect because
they are unchanging. The world of Forms is separate from
our own world (the world of substances) and is
the true basis of reality. Removed from matter, Forms are the
most pure of all things. True knowledge or intelligence is
the ability to grasp the world of Forms with one's mind.
Plato's main evidence for the existence of Forms
is intuitive only, arguing from human perception (a
generalization which applies equally to objects which are
clearly different e.g. blue sky and blue cloth), and
from perfection (a perfect model for various imperfect
copies, which are different but recognizably copies of
the same thing e.g. flawed circles must be imperfect copies of
the same thing).
Plato himself was well aware of the limitations of his theory,
and in particular concocted the "Third Man
Argument" against his own theory: if a Form and a
particular are alike, then there must be another (third) thing
by possession of which they are alike, leading to an infinite
regression. In a later (rather unsatisfactory) version of the
theory, he tried to circumvent this objection by positing that
particulars do not actually exist as such: they "mime" the
Forms, merely appearing to be particulars.
Aristotle points out that proof of Forms and universals rests
on prior knowledge: if we did not know what universals
were in the first place, we would have no idea of what we
were trying to prove, and so could not be trying to prove it.
He also asserted that universals and particulars imply each
other: one is logically prior or posteriorto the other and, if
they are to be regarded as distinct, then they
cannot be "universal" and "particulars".
Other critics have argued that Forms, not being spatial,
cannot have a shape, so it cannot be that a particular of, say,
an apple is the same shape as the Form of an apple. They
have also questioned how one can have the concept of a Form
existing in some special realm of the universe, apart from
space and time, since such a concept cannot come
from sense-perception.
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Moderate Realism
Moderate Realism is the view that there is no separate
realmwhere universals (or universal concepts) exist, but
that they are located in space and time wherever they happen
to be manifest. Moderate realism represents a middle
ground between Platonic Realism or Extreme Realism (see
section above) and the opposite extreme, Nominalism (the
position that abstract concepts, general terms or universals
have no independent existence, but exist only as names).
It distinguishes between the thing itself with the way it
exists: a thing exists in the mind as a universal, and in
reality it exists as an individual. Thus, what our
ideas present to us in a universal does not exist outside the
mind as a universal, but as an individual. Moderate Realism
therefore recognizes both sense knowledge, which presents
things in their individuality, and intellectual conceptual
knowledge, which presents things in their more abstract
nature.
A similar attempt to bridge the gap between Realism
and Nominalism is known as Conceptualism, the doctrine
(initiated by Peter Abelard) that universals exist only within
the mind and have no external or substantial reality. Modern
Conceptualism, as represented by Immanuel Kant, holds that
universals have no connection with external things because
they are exclusively produced by our a priori mental
structures and functions.
Aristotle espoused a form of Moderate Realism, as did St.
Thomas Aquinas, and even some modern philosophers such as
the Frenchmen Jacques Maritain (1882 - 1973)
and Étienne Gilson(1884 - 1978).
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Modal Realism
Modal Realism is the view, notably propounded by David
Lewis(1941 - 2001), that possible worlds are just as real as
the actualworld we live in, and not just abstract
possibilities. The termgoes back to Gottfried Leibniz's
theory of possible worlds, which he used to
analyze modal notions of necessity and possibility.
Lewis claimed that:
 Possible worlds exist: they are just as real as our world.
 Possible worlds are the same sort of things as our world: they
differ in content, not in kind.
 Possible worlds cannot be reduced to something more basic: they
are irreducible entities in their own right.
 When we talk of our "actual" world, the term "actual"
is indexical (merely indicating some particular state of affairs):
it does not mean that our world is any more realthan any other.
 Possible worlds are spatio-temporally isolated from each other:
they do not exist in the same space or time.
 Possible worlds are causally isolated from each other: they do
not interact with each other.
Lewis himself raises several lines of argument against the
theory, and then proceeds to counter them, and it has proven
to be remarkably resilient, despite its apparent affront
to common sense.
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Moral Realism
Moral Realism (or Moral Objectivism) is the meta-
ethicalview (see the section on Ethics) that there
are objective moral values which are independent of our
perception of them or our stance towards them. Therefore,
moral judgments describe moral facts. It is
a cognitivist view (cognitivism being the view that ethical
sentences express propositions and are therefore "truth-
apt" i.e. they are able to be true or false), and it contrasts
with expressivist or non-cognitivist theories of moral
judgment, error theories, fictionalist theories
and constructivist or relativist theories.
Plato and (arguably) Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx were
moral realists, as well as more contemporary philosophers
such as G. E. Moore and Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982).
Moral Realism purportedly allows the ordinary rules
of logic to be applied straightforwardly to moral
statements. It also allows for the resolution of moral
disagreements, because if two moral beliefs contradict one
another, Moral Realism (unlike some other meta-ethical
systems) says that they cannot both be right and so there
should be some way of resolving the situation.
Critics have argued that, while Moral Realism may be able to
explain how to resolve moral conflicts, it cannot explain how
these conflicts arose in the first place. Others have argued
Moral Realism posits a kind of "moral fact" which is non-
material and unobservable and therefore not accessible to
the scientific method.
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Other Types of Realism
Other than the more widely known types of Realism
described in the sections above, there are many others
disciplines which are related to Realism, including:
 In Metaphysics:
o Transcendental Realism is the theory, described
(although not subscribed to) by Immanuel Kant, that implies
individuals have a perfect understanding of
the limitations of their own minds. Kant himself was
a Transcendental Idealist in that he believed that our
experience of things is about how they appear to us, and he
did not believe one could ever understand the world as
it actually exists.
o Organic Realism (or Philosophy of Organism, now
known as Process Philosophy) is the metaphysical
philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, in which subjective
forms complement Plato's eternal objects or Forms. The
theory identifies metaphysical reality
with change and dynamism, and holds that change is
not illusory or purely accidental to the substance, but
rather the very cornerstone of reality or Being.
 In Epistemology:
o Epistemological Realism is the view (considered a
subcategory of Objectivism) that what you know about an
object exists independently of your mind. It is directly
related to the correspondence theory of truth (that the
truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it
relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes,
or corresponds with, that world).
o Indirect Realism is the view (also known
as Representationalism or Epistemological Dualism) that
the world we see in conscious experience is not the real
 world itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica of
that world in an internal representation.
o New Realism is a 20th Century theory which rejected of the
epistemological Dualism of John Locke and the older forms of
Realism, on the grounds that, when one is conscious of an
object, it is an error to say that there are two distinct facts:
knowledge of the object in a mind, and an extra-mental
object in itself.
 In Ethics:
o Moral Realism is the meta-ethical view that there
are objective moral values which are independent of our
perception of them or our stance towards them. Therefore,
moral judgments describe moral facts. It purportedly
allows the ordinary rules of logic to be applied
straightforwardly to moral statements. It also allows for
the resolution of moral disagreements, because if two moral
beliefs contradict one another, Moral Realism (unlike some
other meta-ethical systems) says that they cannot both be
right and so there should be some way of resolving the
situation. Plato and (arguably) Immanuel Kant and Karl
Marx were moral realists, as well as more contemporary
philosophers such as G. E. Moore and Ayn Rand (1905 - 82).
o Quasi-Realism is the meta-ethical theory that, although
our moral claims are projectivist (attributing or projecting
qualities to an object as if those qualities actually belong to it),
we understand them in realist terms as part of our
ethical experience of the world. The theory was developed
by Simon Blackburn (1944 - ),
who challenged philosophers to explain how two situations
can demand different ethical responses without referring
to a difference in the situations themselves, and argued that,
as this challenge is effectively unmeetable, there must be
a realist componentin our notions of ethics. However,
Blackburn admitted that ethics cannot be entirely realist
either, for this would not allow for phenomena such as
the gradual development of ethical positions over time.
 In Aesthetics:
o Aesthetic Realism is the view that reality, or the world, has
a structure that is beautiful, and that unifies
 oppositeslike a great work of art should, and can therefore
can be liked honestly, as one would a work of art. The theory
was developed by the American poet and critic Eli Siegel in
1941, and became something of a cult as its proponents
claimed the one true answer to universal happiness, on the
grounds that everyone's deepest desire to like the world on
an honest or accurate basis.
 In Political Philosophy:
o Political Realism (or Power Politics) is the theory
in Political Philosophy that the primary motivation of states
is the desire for military and economic power or security,
rather than ideals or ethics. It views mankind from
the Hobbesian perspective that it
is not inherently benevolent, but rather self-
centered and competitive, as well as being
inherently aggressive and/or obsessed with security.
Historically, such a view can be traced back to Sun
Tzu and Han Feizi in ancient China, Thucydides in ancient
Greece and Chanakya in ancient India, through the political
philosophers Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, to
more modern day politicians and theorists like Otto von
Bismarck (1815 - 98), Carl von Clausewitz (1780 -
1831), Charles de Gaulle (1890 - 1970) and Joseph
Stalin (1878 - 1953).
o Liberal Realism (also known as the English School of
international relations theory) is the theory in Political
Philosophy that there exists a society of states at the
international level, despite the lack of a ruler or world state.
It supports a Rationalist or Grotian tradition, seeking a
middle way between the power politics of Political Realism
and the utopianism of revolutionary theories. Liberal
Realism holds that, while the international system
is anarchical, order can be promoted
through diplomacy, international law and society.
o Neorealism (or Structural Realism) is the theory
that international structures act as a constraint on state
behavior, so that only states whose outcomes fall within
an expected range can be expected to survive.
 In Philosophy of Religion:
 o Christian Realism is a 20th Century philosophy, advocated
by Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 - 1971), which holds that
the kingdom of heaven can not be realized on Earth
because of the innately corrupt tendencies of society. Due
to the natural injustices that arise on Earth, a person is
therefore forced to compromise the reality of the kingdom
of heaven on Earth.
o Mystical Realism is the view, originating with the Russian
philosopher Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1974 -
1948), that divine entities are real, even if they do not
existin terms of the normal definition of existence (i.e.
occupying space, having matter, existing in time, and being
affected by causation).
 In Philosophy of Perception:
o Critical Realism is the theory which maintains that there
exists an objectively knowable, mind-independent reality,
and that some of our sense-data accurately represent these
external objects, properties and events, while others do not.
The theory is a modern take on the ideas
of Locke and Descartes that the sense-data of secondary
qualities (such as color, taste, texture, smell and sound) do
not representanything in the external world, even if they are
caused by primary qualities (such as shape, size, distance,
hardness and volume).
o Naïve Realism (also known as Direct
Realism or Common Sense Realism) is a common sense
theory of perception, holding that the world is pretty much as
our common sense would have it (all objects are composed
of matter, they occupy space, and have properties such as
size, shape, texture, smell, taste and color, all of which are
usually perceived correctly). Opponents of the theory
(like Bertrand Russell) have attacked it as not accounting for
the phenomenon that the same object may appear differently
to different people, or to the same person at different
times. This theory can be contrasted to Scientific
Realism(see below).
o Representative Realism, (also known as Indirect
Realism, Epistemological Dualism and The Veil of
Perception), is the theory that we do not (and cannot)
 perceive the external world directly. Thus, a barrier or a
veil of perception (between the mind and the existing world)
prevents first-hand knowledge of anything beyond it.
Instead, we know only our ideas or interpretations of
objects in the world (Representationalism), although it
maintains (unlike Idealism) that those ideas come
from sense-data of a real, material, external world. The
theory was subscribed to at various levels by Aristotle, Baruch
Spinoza, René Descartes, John Locke and Bertrand Russell.
o Hyper-Realism (or Hyper-Reality) is the view
in semiotics and Post-Modernist philosophy
that consciousness is unable to
distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in
technologically advanced post-modern cultures. In this
way, consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world
where a multitude of media can
radically shape and filter the original event or experience
being depicted.
 In Philosophy of Science:
o Scientific Realism is the view that the world described by
science is the real world, independent of what we might take
it to be, and that unobservable things talked about by
science are little different from ordinary observable things.
Its proponents point out that scientific knowledge
is progressive in nature, and that it is able
to predictphenomena remarkably successfully. An example
of a Scientific Realist is John Locke, who held the world only
contains the primary qualities (such as shape, size, distance,
hardness and volume), and that other properties were
entirely subjective, depending for their existence upon
some perceiver who can observe the objects. However,
although it is related to much older philosophical positions
including Rationalism and Realism, it is essentially a 20th
Century thesis, developed largely as a reaction to Logical
Positivism.
o Entity Realism is a theory within Scientific Realism which
claims that the theoretical entities that feature in scientific
theories (e.g. 'electrons') should be regarded as real only if
they refer to phenomena that can
 be manipulated and investigated independently. Entity
Realism does not commit itself to judgments concerning
the truth of scientific theories, but posits "manipulative
success" as the criterion by which to judge the reality of
(typically unobservable) scientific entities.
o Constructive Realism is the view in Philosophy of
Science that the theory of Constructivism (that
humans construct meaning from current knowledge
structures, and that knowledge is contingent on convention,
human perception, and social experience) be applied
to science. It utilizes a strategy called strangification,
which means taking a scientific proposition system out of its
context and putting it in another context.
 In Philosophy of Mathematics:
o Mathematical Realism is the view that mathematical
truths are objective, and that mathematical entities
exist independently of the human mind, and therefore are
to be discovered rather than invented. There are
various typesof Mathematical Realism depending on
what sort of existence one takes mathematical entities to
have. The view effectively echoes the ancient doctrine
of Platonic Realism(see section above).
 In Philosophy of Law:
o Legal Realism is the theory that all law is made by human
beings and is therefore subject to human foibles, frailties
and imperfections. The theory was developed in the first
half of the 20th Century, principally by Oliver Wendell
Holmes in the United States and Axel Hägerström in
Scandinavia. Many legal realists believe that the law in the
books (statutes, cases, etc) does not necessarily determine the
results of legal disputes (the indeterminacy of law); many
believe that interdisciplinary (e.g. sociological and
anthropological) approaches to law are important; many also
believe in legal instrumentalism, the view that the law
should be used as a tool to achieve social purposes and to
balance competing societal interests.
 There are also several Realism movements within
the arts(visual arts, theatre, literature, film, etc), which generally
attempt to depict subjects as they appear in everyday life, as well
 as many Realism-related movements
like Hyperrealism, Fantastic Realism, Magical
Realism, Photorealism, Poetic Realism, Social
Realism, Socialist Realism, etc.

Mastin, L. (2009, January). Existence and Consciousness.

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