Samuel Alexander Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Passmore

Critical Essay by John Passmore

SOURCE: "The New Realists," in A Hundred Years of Philosophy, Basic Books, Inc., 1966, pp. 259-80.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1957, Passmore focuses on Alexander in a discussion of realist philosophers of the early twentieth century.

In the early years of the present century, it could no longer be presumed that Realism was intellectually disreputable, a mere vulgar prejudice. What a mind knows, Brentano and Meinong had argued, exists independently of the act by which it is known; Mach, and James after him—if they were still, from a Realist point of view, tainted with subjectivism—had at least denied that what is immediately perceived is a state of mind; and then Moore, seconded by Russell, had rejected that thesis which Idealists like Bradley and phenomenalists like Mill had united in regarding as indisputable: that the existence of objects of perception consists in the fact that they...
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