Abstract
The objective of this paper is to analyze the convergences and divergences between two conceptions of realism: Markus Gabriel’s “new realism” and Evandro Agazzi’s realism. Firstly, the main theses behind “new realism” will be presented, drawing on Gabriel’s text ‘Why the World Does Not Exist’ (2015), originally published in German as Warum es die Welt nicht gibt in 2013. Secondly, the constitutive aspects of realism developed by Agazzi will be explored, primarily in works such as ‘Temas y problemas de filosofía de la física’ (1978), ‘Filosofia, scienza e verità’, Rusconi, Milano (1989), ‘El bien el mal y la ciencia’ (1996), and ‘Filosofía de la Naturaleza. Ciencia y Cosmología’ (2000), among others. Finally, the convergences and divergences between these two conceptions of realism will be analyzed, allowing for an inference, based on sound reasoning, about the potential novelty of the so-called “new realism”.
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Notes
All quotations taken from Agazzi’s Spanish texts were translated into English by the author of this paper.
If we understand metaphysics in the first of its two fundamental meanings, i.e., as an explanation of the most universal characteristics of reality-, […] Under this aspect, metaphysics appears as the unfolding of the general conditions of intelligibility of reality, and in this sense, metaphysics simply cannot be avoided. Regarding the second aspect of metaphysics, the author points it out as: “the one that performs a discourse relative to suprasensible levels of reality. […] Metaphysics, in its second meaning, goes further by trying to see whether this picture can be endowed with a more committed ontological status-that is, whether there exist entities that are not empirically ascertainable (Agazzi E., Filosofía de la Naturaleza. Ciencia y Cosmología, 2000, p. 43 [author’s translation]). If we qualify metaphysics as the effort to investigate reality from the point of view of totality, which is different from investigating from the “totality of experience”, the principle of verification cannot constitute an objection because it is simply a criterion of “demarcation”, which circumscribes only the domain of science (“that is, the domain of the totality of experience”). That which does not satisfy this principle may be said to fall outside of science, but not outside of all meaningful inquiry (Agazzi E., Filosofía de la Naturaleza. Ciencia y Cosmología, 2000, pp. 55–56 [author’s translation]).
If we now say that knowledge must be expressible by means of true propositions, we not only link knowledge with truth, but may see that the classical problem of providing ‘criteria of truth’ for propositions reduces to the problem of how to show that a proposition is actually the expression of some kind of knowledge. Indeed to show that a proposition is true (at least in the most common sense to which we shall limit ourseleves here) amounts to showing that the state of affairs described by that proposition actually obtains, or is the case, but this is exactly knowing this state of affairs. In other words: saying “I know that ‘p’ is true” is equivalent to saying “I know that p”, where p is the state of affairs described by ‘p’. (Agazzi, Are there different kinds of knowledge?, 1995, pág. 3)
References
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Acknowledgements
For their comments, revisions and academic support in the writing of this article to: Germán Guerrero Pino PhD professor of Philosophy of Science at the Universidad del Valle Cali, Colombia and the research group Episteme: Philosophy and Science, of the same university.
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Rengifo-Castañeda, CA. Convergences and Divergences Between the “new realism” and the Realism of Evandro Agazzi. glob. Philosophy 33, 45 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-023-09695-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-023-09695-x