What is Realism?

Abstract

In the paper to which I am responding, Professor Ayers has set himself the task of formulating a tenable version of realism. Professor Ayers does a number of things: he provides his reading of the origins and developments of the debate about realism and its alternatives in modern philosophy; he criticises some recent prominent ideas, as either inconsistent with realism, and hence as being, as he sees it, idealist, or as being in other ways inadequate; and, he spells out, sometimes without fully developing them, different aspects of the views he favours. Ayers's discussion is both interesting and rich, and my response cannot engage with much of it. I shall certainly not attempt to give an answer to the question in Ayers's title.Article