Tag Archives: epistemic realism

Epistemic Realism in Bradley and Early Moore / Review of work on Wittgenstein

Volume 9.6 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access:

https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/view/446

It features an article by Francesco Pesci, entitled, “Epistemic Realism in Bradley and Early Moore”. Here is the abstract:

In this paper I attempt to show how Moore’s early emancipation from Bradley’s absolute idealism presupposes a fundamental adherence to certain theses of absolute idealism itself. In particular, I argue that the idea of an immediate epistemic access to concepts and propositions that Moore endorses in his platonic atomism (Hylton) is a reworking of a form of epistemic realism already present in Bradley. Epistemic realism is the conjunction of two theses: i) reality is independent of any constructive work of the human mind; ii) reality is immediately (non-discursively) accessible to knowledge. In this paper I first focus on Moore’s early idealist phase (1897), suggesting that it should be understood as an attempt at isolating this thesis in Bradley against Kant’s transcendental idealism. I then suggest that it is on the background of an invariant adherence to it that we should understand Moore’s later rejection of monism and idealism (1898–9) through his anti-psychologism. I hence explore how epistemic realism is at work in Moore’s platonic atomism and conclude with some remarks about the further significance of Moore’s rejection of Kant.

The volume also contains a review of José Zalabardo, Representation and Reality in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Oxford University Press, 2015), written by Joshua Eisenthal.
JHAP is a free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal.

It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!