Philosophical realism

[1][2][3][4] This includes a number of positions within epistemology and metaphysics which express that a given thing instead exists independently of knowledge, thought, or understanding.

[11][12] The oldest use of the term "realism" appeared in medieval scholastic interpretations and adaptations of ancient Greek philosophy.

[13] The term comes from Late Latin realis "real" and was first used in the abstract metaphysical sense by Immanuel Kant in 1781 (CPR A 369).

The objects of perception include such familiar items as paper clips, suns and olive oil tins.

The naive realist view is that objects have properties, such as texture, smell, taste and colour, that are usually perceived absolutely correctly.

The debate over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories.

Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make reliable claims about unobservables (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as observables.

Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world.

Since Plato frames Forms as ideas that are literally real (existing even outside of human minds), this stance is also called Platonic idealism.

There were many ancient Indian realist schools, such as the Mimamsa, Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, Nyaya, Yoga, Samkhya, Sauntrantika, Jain, Vaisesika, and others.

The roots of Scottish Common Sense Realism can be found in responses to such philosophers as John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.

They taught that ordinary experiences provide intuitively certain assurance of the existence of the self, of real objects that could be seen and felt and of certain "first principles" upon which sound morality and religious beliefs could be established.

Its members included Franz Brentano,[25] Alexius Meinong,[25] Vittorio Benussi,[25] Ernst Mally,[26] and early Edmund Husserl.

Dialectical materialism, a philosophy of nature based on the writings of late modern philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is interpreted to be a form of ontological realism.

[29] In contemporary analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell,[30] Ludwig Wittgenstein,[31] J. L. Austin,[32] Karl Popper,[33][34] and Gustav Bergmann[35] espoused metaphysical realism.