The untruth of reality: the unacknowledged realism of modern philosophy

Description

Some scholars claim that we live in a time of many 'new realisms', that with Kant, any contact to the outside world was lost. In this book, Jure Simoniti sets out to retrace another tendency in Western philosophy, arguing that the possibility of realism has always been there. Paradoxically, it is precisely Kant's practical subject, who, at the moment of becoming aware of the moral law within him, fixes his gaze upon the starry heavens and from the point of view of this immensity of "worlds upon worlds" appears to himself not as a monster of anthropomorphism, but as an "animal creature." Simoniti argues that the epistemological self-inauguration of the subject goes hand in hand with its anthropological dethronement, and the god-like centrality of the ego is constantly outbalanced with its creatural marginality, becoming a vanishing point at the edge of a foreign universe. It seems that the subject only assumes the role of ratio essendi for the whole of reality, the role of...