Critical Realism
Critical Realism is the title of a book by Roy W. Sellars published in 1916. The name was adopted by a group of philosophers who shared many of his views on the theory of knowledge. Essays in Critical Realism: A Cooperative Study of the Problem of Knowledge by Durant Drake, A. O. Lovejoy, J. B. Pratt, A. K. Rogers, George Santayana, C. A. Strong, and Sellars was published in 1920.
Background
Much of the epistemological debate since the seventeenth century stems from the matter-mind dualism of René Descartes, who argued that what we know first and most surely is not a physical world but the existence of our own minds, and of John Locke, who argued that we are immediately acquainted only with our own ideas. Starting from these assumptions, how can one know a physical world external to the mind, if, indeed, such a world exists at all? Critical Realism is a chapter in this long debate. Some philosophers, finding it impossible to bridge the gap from a mental world to a material reality that transcends it, turned to some form of subjectivism or idealism; at the beginning of the twentieth century the dominant philosophy in Britain was the Neo-Hegelian idealism of F.
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