ABSTRACT
In the entry for Realism in his seminal Keywords, Raymond Williams points to the complex history of the word and its associates, noting that originally realism was a medieval school of thought opposed to nominalism, and more akin to what today we would call idealism. “The old doctrine of Realism was an assertion of the absolute and objective existence of … universal Forms or Ideas [that] were held … to exist independently of the objects in which they were perceived” (2015 [1976], p. 198). It derived from Plato’s argument that intelligible ideas coincided with the essential properties of things, a pure manifestation of the truth inaccessible to the five senses. Such ideas we cannot discover by empirical means, rather through a recollection of their innate prints in the mind, brought into focus by rigorous meditation. Although it is certainly true that in its scholastic guise the doctrine of forms “may be said to have faded” (ibid.), it is equally true that after its Cartesian renovation as the cogito, it has enjoyed a buoyant afterlife. What we know today as cognitive science, “an ontology that divorces the activity of the mind from the body in the world” (Ingold, 2011 [2000], p. 165), shares Descartes’s dualist proposition that our most important ideas are vouchsafed to the mind no thanks to impressions of the material world (evidence).
