New Realism
"New Realism" arose at the turn of the twentieth century in opposition to the Idealist doctrines that the known or perceived object is dependent for its existence on the act of knowing and that the immediately perceived object is a state of the perceiving mind. The Austrian philosophers Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong first enunciated the cardinal tenet of this new realism: that what the mind knows or perceives exists independently of the acts of knowing and perceiving. Developing mainly as a polemic against Idealism, this new realism was represented prior to 1900 in England in the works of such men as John Cook Wilson, Thomas Case, H. W. B. Joseph, and H. A. Prichard. Similar realist polemics were taking place in Sweden and Italy.
In America the movement known as New Realism dates from the critical writings of William P. Montague and Ralph Barton Perry in 1901 and 1902. Their immediate aim was to refute Josiah Royce's "refutation" of realism, which he had based on the claim that the knower and the known could not be independent of each other and still be related. The movement took definite form when Montague and Perry were joined by four others in a statement of a New Realist program ("The Program and First Platform of Six Realists") in 1910.
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