Let us say, then, that both the realist and the antirealist accept the results of scientific investigations as "true," on a par wi...th more homely truths.... And call this acceptance of scientific truths the "core position." What distinguishes realists from antirealists, then, is what they add onto this core position ... a third alternative emerges--and an attractive one at that. It is the core position itself, and all by itself.... Let me introduce the acronym NOA (pronounced as in "Noah"), for natural ontological attitude, and, henceforth, refer to the core position under that designation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of w...hich history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are..., you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appe...arances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is a ...realist, and converses with things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly courtesies and decorations of social life. The virtues... are economists, but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth from five hundred to fifteen hundred a year.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist ...I have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a word, the Roman lacked the humanitas (the sure sense of human values and of the part played by man in the universe) which mad...e the Greek civilization great. The Greek saw life steadily and saw it whole; the Roman saw it steadily, but his vision was strictly limited, and it did not occur to him to ask whether he saw life whole. He saw life in terms of action and action in terms of his own needs; he never attained by himself to con sciousness of the world of thought and to the vision of the ideals by which all right action must be governed. It is true and fortunate for posterity that he was inspired by Greek idealism to much of his greatest work, but in himself he remained the realist of the Western world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »