98:4 October 2015 
The New Realism

Deadline for Submissions: October 31, 2014 
Advisory Editors: Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris

Both in the Continental and in the analytic world, philosophical realism is becoming ever more fashionable. On the Continental side, the experience of the post-9/11 wars and of recent economic crises has led to a harsh denial of two central tenets of postmodernism, both held, for example, by Foucault, Vattimo, and Rorty: (1) that reality is socially constructed and infinitely malleable, and (2) that ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ represent useless notions. Facts cannot be reduced to interpretations, as even Derrida (in his final years) and more recently Latour, have recognized. On the analytic side, too, the situation is very different from what it was in the heyday of Feyerabend, Goodman, Davidson, Kuhn, Dummett, van Fraassen, and Hacking – as is shown by the growth of analytical metaphysics and of alternatives to anti-realism in semantics and philosophy of science. Now, however, philosophy is polarized between the (mostly analytic) view according to which only natural science can tell us what really exists and another (mostly Continental) view according to which only an anti-naturalistic stance can do justice to socio-political phenomena. The challenge, then, is this: can a New Realism be developed that can do justice both to the scientific worldview and to the phenomena of value, norms, politics, and religion. Papers are invited which rise to this challenge.