New Realism (20th‑Century Analytic Epistemology and Metaphysics)

1. Introduction

New Realism was an early 20th‑century, self‑consciously programmatic movement in Anglo‑American philosophy that defended a robustly mind‑independent reality and a direct realist account of knowledge. It arose primarily in the United States and Britain in explicit opposition to then‑dominant forms of absolute and personal idealism, which had portrayed reality as fundamentally mental or spiritual and had treated knowledge as mediated by inner representations or categories of consciousness.

The movement is most closely associated with a group of six American philosophers—Edwin B. Holt, Walter T. Marvin, William Pepperell Montague, Ralph Barton Perry, Walter B. Pitkin, and Edward Gleason Spaulding—who issued a joint manifesto, the “Platform of Six Realists” (1907), and a collaborative volume, The New Realism (1912). These texts articulated a common set of theses about:

• the existence of a world of objects, properties, and relations that does not depend on being perceived or thought;
• the claim that in perception and knowledge we are directly related to these very objects and facts, not to sense‑data, ideas, or appearances;
• the insistence that relations and propositions are themselves real constituents of the world.

Although short‑lived as a unified school, New Realism belonged squarely to the formative phase of analytic epistemology and metaphysics. It interacted intensively with American pragmatism, British and American idealism, emergent analytic realism in Moore and Russell, and later with critical realism and logical positivism. Historians now typically interpret New Realism as a transitional episode that helped dislodge idealism and normalize realist assumptions within Anglophone philosophy, while also exposing conceptual tensions about perception, truth, and the status of propositions that shaped subsequent analytic debates.

2. Chronological Boundaries and Periodization

New Realism does not correspond to a single institution or school but to a relatively brief, self‑identified period of realist theorizing. Scholars usually mark its boundaries in relation to two key programmatic events and its later fragmentation.

Approximate Time Frame

The start date is often fixed at 1907, when Holt, Marvin, Montague, Perry, Pitkin, and Spaulding jointly announced their “program and first platform” in The Journal of Philosophy. The end date is more conventional and approximate: by the early 1930s, few philosophers still used the label “New Realist” for their own work, and the philosophical landscape was dominated by logical empiricism, pragmatism, and more technically sophisticated analytic metaphysics.

Relation to Larger Periodizations

Historians typically situate New Realism within Early 20th‑Century Analytic Philosophy, as both a reaction against late 19th‑century Anglo‑American idealism and a precursor to mid‑century analytic realism and scientific philosophy. It is generally treated as a distinct historical construct rather than a continuous tradition: a brief episode marked by manifestos and collective publications, whose doctrines persisted in modified form even after the movement’s institutional identity dissolved.

3. Historical Context

New Realism emerged against a complex background of intellectual, institutional, and social change in the early 20th century, especially in the United States and Britain.

Academic and Institutional Setting

Philosophy departments in both countries were undergoing professionalization. In the United States, expanding universities, new journals (such as The Journal of Philosophy), and growing specialization supported the formation of identifiable “movements.” Many younger philosophers were trained within or under the shadow of neo‑Hegelian and absolute idealist traditions. New Realism crystallized as part of a generational challenge to these older chairs and curricula.

In Britain, the waning prestige of Victorian idealism and the influence of Moore and Russell created a receptive climate for realist attitudes, even when not explicitly labeled “New Realist.” Across the Atlantic, American pragmatism (James, Dewey, Mead) provided an additional, non‑idealist foil, pushing realists to distinguish their own commitments from both idealism and instrumentalism.

Scientific and Cultural Background

Late 19th‑ and early 20th‑century physics (relativity, early quantum theory), experimental psychology, and emerging behaviorism challenged older, introspection‑centered pictures of the mind and world. New Realists aimed to align metaphysics and epistemology with these developments while preserving a robustly realist picture of objects and causal processes.

Culturally, the period around World War I was marked by modernist critiques of inherited notions of subjectivity, value, and meaning. New Realists shared some of the suspicion toward grand speculative metaphysical systems but did not embrace the more radical anti‑metaphysical stances that later characterized logical positivism. They instead sought a stable, object‑centered ontology that could underwrite both common‑sense and scientific knowledge.

Religious and Moral Context

Anglo‑American idealism had often been intertwined with Christian moral and theological frameworks. New Realists tended to secularize metaphysical and epistemological inquiry, arguing that the existence and nature of the world did not depend on divine or spiritual underpinnings. Their critics sometimes portrayed this as a threat to traditional moral and religious outlooks, while realists typically presented it as a clarification of philosophy’s proper, non‑theological domain.

4. The Zeitgeist of Early 20th‑Century Realism

The zeitgeist of early 20th‑century realism, within which New Realism is a prominent strand, combined scientific optimism, dissatisfaction with speculative idealism, and a desire for conceptual clarity.

Scientific Optimism and Anti‑Metaphysical Suspicion

Many philosophers regarded the natural sciences as the paradigm of rational inquiry. This fostered an expectation that philosophy should:

• be continuous with science in method and subject matter;
• abandon a priori, system‑building metaphysics of the Hegelian sort;
• address concrete problems about perception, causation, and space‑time.

Realists of various stripes saw themselves as allies of science, insisting that successful scientific theories track a mind‑independent reality rather than constructing merely useful fictions.

From Consciousness‑First to World‑First Philosophies

There was a marked shift away from consciousness‑centered philosophical frameworks toward object‑centered or world‑first approaches. New Realists, along with Moore and Russell, treated:

• external objects, properties, and relations as primary;
• mental acts and experiences as themselves items within the same world, rather than as a separate inner realm.

This reorientation underwrote efforts to dissolve skeptical problems that, on their view, had been generated by representational theories of mind and experience.

Conceptual Analysis and Logical Form

The era also saw rising interest in analysis—of concepts, propositions, and logical form—as a distinctively philosophical method. While New Realists did not always share the later analytic movement’s technical sophistication in logic, they participated in a broader trend that emphasized:

• clear articulation of propositions and their constituents;
• scrutiny of the relations of truth, reference, and acquaintance;
• suspicion toward obscure metaphysical categories.

In this environment, realism was not only a metaphysical thesis about what exists, but also a methodological commitment to treating philosophical problems as about objects and relations in a shared, public world rather than about private experiences or transcendental structures of consciousness.

5. Core Doctrines of New Realism

Although individual New Realists disagreed on details, the Platform of Six Realists and related writings converge on several core doctrines.

Direct Knowledge of a Mind‑Independent World

New Realists held that:

• there exists a mind‑independent reality of objects, properties, and relations;
• in perception and knowledge we are directly related to these items, not to intermediate “appearances,” “ideas,” or sense‑data.

They opposed what they called epistemic dualism, the idea that knowing always involves a mental content distinct from the external object, arguing that such a view makes skepticism intractable.

Reality of Relations and Propositions

Another central thesis is relations realism: relations such as “knowing,” “larger than,” or “being north of” are genuine constituents of the world, not mere ways of speaking.

Many New Realists also treated propositions as real complexes composed of objects, properties, and relations. A proposition like “this table is brown” was thought to be a structured fact or complex that exists whether or not it is believed.

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“The objects of knowledge are identical with the objects which exist independently of being known.”

— Holt et al., The Program and First Platform of Six Realists (1907)

Object‑Centered Epistemology

In contrast to introspection‑based, subject‑first epistemologies, New Realists developed an object‑centered approach. Features of the object—its color, shape, location, and causal powers—were taken as primary in explaining:

• how perception occurs;
• how misperception and error are possible;
• what it is for a belief to be true or false.

Knowledge was analyzed as a relation between a knower and the very object or fact known, within a single, unified world.

Anti‑Idealism and Pluralism

Finally, New Realists collectively rejected absolute idealism and monism. They endorsed a pluralistic ontology of many distinct entities and relations, resisting attempts to assimilate all reality to one overarching spiritual or experiential whole. This pluralism was intended to respect both common‑sense distinctions and the ontological commitments of empirical science.

6. Central Problems and Debates

New Realism was structured around a cluster of interrelated philosophical problems, several of which became loci of internal disagreement and external criticism.

The External World and Epistemic Dualism

The first central problem concerned the status of the external world. New Realists argued that skepticism about other minds, material objects, or unobserved entities was generated by epistemic dualism—the idea that the immediate objects of awareness are inner mental states or sense‑data. They proposed that by identifying the objects of perception with the very things in the world, one could avoid skeptical gaps.

Critics questioned whether this “direct” relation could account for illusion, hallucination, and perceptual variation. These challenges led to detailed debates about how to characterize error without reintroducing problematic intermediaries.

Nature of Perception and Sense‑Data

Relatedly, there were disputes about perceptual experience. New Realists rejected traditional sense‑data theories, but some interlocutors (and later critical realists) argued that some form of mediating content was needed to explain subjective character, privacy, and the possibility of conflicting appearances.

Within the movement, disagreements arose over whether certain “contents” could be admitted without collapsing into representationalism, and over how to describe perceptual awareness in non‑psychologistic terms.

Relations, Universals, and Propositions

Another focal issue was the ontological status of relations and universals. New Realists generally affirmed their reality, but differed about:

• whether relations are external (holding independently of the natures of their relata) or have some internal basis;
• how universals and particulars jointly compose propositions;
• whether propositions are identical with facts or distinct abstract entities.

These debates connected New Realism to contemporaneous work by Moore and Russell on logical form, and to idealist controversies about the alleged incoherence of external relations.

Philosophy and Science

A further set of problems centered on the relation between philosophy and empirical science. New Realists sought to support scientific realism while resisting both:

• idealist claims that scientific concepts are mere appearances within a larger spiritual reality;
• positivist tendencies to restrict meaningful discourse to what is empirically verifiable.

Disagreements persisted over how far philosophical claims about objects, causation, and space‑time should be constrained by current scientific theories, and whether metaphysics could legitimately go beyond science while remaining realist.

7. Major Schools and Movements in Dialogue

New Realism developed in sustained conversation—with both allies and opponents—across several philosophical currents. These interactions shaped its doctrines and provided much of its argumentative context.

Dialogue Partners and Opponents

Typical Points of Engagement

• With idealists, New Realists debated the reality of relations, the independence of objects from knowing, and the plausibility of an all‑encompassing Absolute.
• With pragmatists, they discussed whether truth is best understood as correspondence to an independent reality or as warranted assertibility and practical success.
• With Moore and Russell, there was convergence on anti‑idealism but divergence over the role of logical analysis, the status of sense‑data, and how to construe acquaintance.
• With critical realists, exchanges focused on whether positing cognitive contents undermines direct realism or is required for explaining perception and error.
• With phenomenologists, debates (often indirect or via reception) revolved around whether New Realism adequately captures intentionality and the structures of experience.

These dialogues positioned New Realism as one prominent, but not solitary, strand in a broader realist turn in early 20th‑century philosophy.

8. Internal Chronology and Phases of Development

The development of New Realism can be divided into several overlapping phases, each marked by characteristic concerns and interactions.

Pre‑Formative Critiques of Idealism (1895–1906)

Before the term “New Realism” became current, realist gestures by G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and William James challenged Anglo‑American idealism. Moore’s critiques of absolute idealism and Russell’s early work on relations and denoting provided argumentative tools that later New Realists would appropriate. These years set the stage but did not yet yield a self‑identified movement.

Programmatic New Realism (1907–1912)

This phase begins with:

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“The Program and First Platform of Six Realists” (The Journal of Philosophy, 1907),

in which Holt, Marvin, Montague, Perry, Pitkin, and Spaulding jointly articulated theses about mind‑independent objects, direct knowledge, and the reality of relations. The publication of the cooperative volume The New Realism (1912) elaborated and systematized these ideas, giving the movement clear boundaries and public visibility.

Critical Debate and Diversification (1913–1921)

Following the 1912 volume, New Realism faced sustained criticism from idealists, pragmatists, and early analytic philosophers. Internal tensions emerged over:

• the nature of propositions and universals;
• the treatment of error and illusion;
• the proper account of causation.

During this time, critical realism coalesced, with figures like Roy Wood Sellars and George Santayana accepting mind‑independent reality but introducing mediating contents, thereby modifying or rejecting core New Realist claims.

Fragmentation and Transformation (1922–c.1931)

By the 1920s, the self‑conscious identity of New Realism began to dissolve. Some of its proponents revised their positions or turned to other projects; others integrated aspects of New Realism into broader analytic or naturalistic frameworks. Simultaneously, logical positivism and more formally sophisticated analytic work shifted attention away from the programmatic metaphysics of the earlier realists.

9. Key Figures and Groupings

New Realism involved a network of philosophers with varying degrees of commitment to its platform. Historians often group them according to their roles and intellectual affinities rather than strict doctrinal lines.

The Six Core New Realists

The central group comprises:

• Edwin B. Holt
• Walter T. Marvin
• William Pepperell Montague
• Ralph Barton Perry
• Walter B. Pitkin
• Edward Gleason Spaulding

These six co‑authored the 1907 platform and edited or contributed to The New Realism (1912). They shared the key theses about direct knowledge, mind‑independent reality, and the reality of propositions and relations, though they diverged on specifics (for example, the structure of propositions or the analysis of error).

Allied and Variant Realists

Some philosophers are often treated as allies or variants rather than strict New Realists:

• Roy Wood Sellars
• George Santayana
• Arthur O. Lovejoy
• C. A. Strong

These figures endorsed strong forms of realism but frequently criticized aspects of New Realism, especially its handling of perception and cognition. They played major roles in developing critical realism and related views.

Analytic Realist Precursors and Interlocutors

• G. E. Moore
• Bertrand Russell
• C. D. Broad

Moore’s and Russell’s early realist critiques of idealism anticipated many New Realist themes, while Broad’s later work intersected with debates about perception and sense‑data. Although not self‑identified New Realists, they were crucial interlocutors and significantly shaped the movement’s argumentative context.

Idealist and Pragmatist Critics

• Josiah Royce
• F. H. Bradley
• John Dewey
• William James

Royce and Bradley served as paradigmatic idealist opponents; Dewey and James, as pragmatist critics and sometimes partial allies. Their engagements framed many of the central disputes about truth, experience, and the status of the external world.

10. Landmark Texts and Manifestos

Several texts are widely regarded as defining documents of New Realism and its immediate realist context.

The Program and First Platform of Six Realists (1907)

Published in The Journal of Philosophy, this manifesto jointly authored by Holt, Marvin, Montague, Perry, Pitkin, and Spaulding outlined the movement’s key theses:

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“That the objects of knowledge are independent of the knowing of them, and that knowing is a relation between existent things.”

— Holt et al., The Program and First Platform of Six Realists (1907)

It served as a public declaration of intent and a rallying point for discussion and criticism.

The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy (1912)

This volume collected essays by the same six authors, elaborating their positions on:

• perception and error;
• universals, relations, and propositions;
• truth, knowledge, and the external world.

It provided the most sustained and systematic exposition of New Realist doctrine and became the primary target for idealist, pragmatist, and analytic critiques.

Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (1912)

Perry’s survey situated New Realism among contemporary movements, contrasting it with idealism and pragmatism. The book helped define how the wider philosophical community understood the emerging realist turn:

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“Realism is not a relapse into naïve belief, but an attempt to take the object as the sciences and common sense alike demand it shall be taken.”

— R. B. Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (1912)

Related Realist Collections

While not strictly New Realist, later cooperative works such as Essays in Critical Realism (1920) by Roy Wood Sellars and colleagues illustrate the immediate evolution and critique of New Realist ideas. They are often studied alongside the New Realist manifestos to trace the shift from direct to critical realism.

11. Methodological Commitments and Relation to Science

New Realism’s methodological stance combined allegiance to analysis with a robust respect for empirical science, while resisting reduction of philosophy to any single scientific discipline.

Objectivity and Public Criteria

Methodologically, New Realists favored:

• appeal to publicly accessible objects and facts rather than private experiences;
• arguments grounded in common‑sense intuitions about objects, supplemented by scientific findings;
• rejection of introspective or purely speculative methods associated with idealist systems.

They often presented their own approach as more continuous with ordinary and scientific practices of description than the allegedly rarefied constructions of idealism.

Engagement with the Natural Sciences

New Realists took contemporary physics and psychology seriously as sources of information about the world. Many sought to align their metaphysics of space, time, and causation with:

• relativity and non‑Newtonian conceptions of space‑time;
• experimental and behaviorist psychology, which de‑emphasized introspective data.

At the same time, they rejected extreme forms of positivism that would restrict meaningful discourse to what can be immediately observed or verified, arguing that scientific practice itself presupposes unobservable entities and theoretical structures.

Philosophical Analysis and Propositions

Methodologically, New Realists were committed to analyzing:

• propositions as complexes of objects, properties, and relations;
• the logical structure of truth, reference, and knowledge.

While they did not typically employ the formal logical techniques that later characterized analytic philosophy, they endorsed a broadly analytic orientation: clarifying concepts, dissecting propositions, and uncovering ontological commitments.

Philosophy as Complementary to Science

New Realists generally conceived philosophy as:

• neither a purely empirical discipline nor a purely a priori one;
• responsible for articulating the most general features of reality and of our cognitive relations to it, in a way informed by but not reducible to empirical science.

This intermediate stance generated ongoing debate with both idealists (who assigned philosophy a more foundational role) and emergent logical empiricists (who pushed for stronger methodological continuity with the sciences).

12. Criticisms from Idealism, Pragmatism, and Phenomenology

New Realism attracted extensive criticism from several philosophical quarters, which targeted its accounts of perception, truth, and the subject–object relation.

Idealist Critiques

Idealists such as F. H. Bradley and Josiah Royce argued that New Realism’s pluralistic ontology of independent objects and external relations was incoherent or incomplete. Typical criticisms included:

• that external relations cannot be made sense of without some more encompassing unity;
• that treating objects as entirely independent of knowing neglects the conceptual and experiential conditions under which they are identified;
• that New Realism’s “commonsense” appeal masks unexamined metaphysical assumptions.

From this perspective, the New Realist attempt to place the knower “inside” the world while preserving strict independence of objects was said to result in unresolved tensions.

Pragmatist Critiques

American pragmatists, especially John Dewey (and to some extent William James), questioned:

• whether truth is best understood as correspondence to a ready‑made reality;
• whether New Realism’s fixation on “objects” overlooked the processual, practical, and experiential dimensions of inquiry.

Pragmatists contended that New Realists reified an abstract notion of reality and underplayed the role of contexts of practice, problem‑solving, and human interests in shaping knowledge. Some argued that the insistence on “direct” knowledge of objects ignored the temporal and experimental character of learning.

Phenomenological and Neo‑Kantian Critiques

From phenomenological and neo‑Kantian perspectives, New Realism was often portrayed as naïvely objectivist. Critics claimed that:

• it lacked a sufficiently rich account of intentionality, the directedness of consciousness toward objects;
• it underestimated the role of conceptual structures, horizons, and modes of givenness in making objects intelligible;
• its emphasis on mind‑independent objects and relations did not address the structures of experience that any realism must presuppose.

In some Continental receptions, New Realism served as a foil for more sophisticated analyses of how objects are constituted in consciousness without being reduced to mental constructions.

These criticisms pushed New Realists and their successors to refine accounts of perception, cognition, and truth, and contributed to the emergence of alternative realist frameworks such as critical realism and various phenomenological realisms.

13. Transition to Critical Realism and Logical Positivism

As New Realism encountered internal tensions and external critiques, its themes were reworked within new philosophical frameworks, particularly critical realism and logical positivism.

Emergence of Critical Realism

Critical realism, associated with figures like Roy Wood Sellars, George Santayana, and Arthur O. Lovejoy, accepted the New Realist commitment to a mind‑independent world but modified the doctrine of direct knowledge. Critical realists typically argued that:

• perception and knowledge involve mediating cognitive contents (sometimes called “essences,” “images,” or “contents”);
• these mediating elements are not themselves material objects but are necessary to explain illusion, error, and the structure of experience.

From their standpoint, New Realism had underestimated the complexity of cognition by rejecting all intermediaries. Critical realism thus positioned itself as a corrective: preserving metaphysical realism while offering a more nuanced epistemology.

Rise of Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism

During the 1920s and early 1930s, logical positivism (and more broadly logical empiricism) gained prominence, especially through the Vienna Circle and its Anglophone reception. Logical positivists shared with New Realists a suspicion of speculative idealist metaphysics, but they advanced a different response:

• emphasis on verification and logical analysis of language;
• skepticism toward unrestricted metaphysics, including some New Realist claims about propositions, relations, and unobservable entities.

To the extent that New Realism made robust ontological claims not tightly constrained by empirical verification or logical reconstruction, logical positivists regarded it as insufficiently critical.

Absorption and Transformation

In this transitional period:

• some former New Realists moved toward critical realism or more naturalistic frameworks;
• realist themes were absorbed into analytic philosophy, now equipped with more advanced tools in logic and philosophy of language;
• the self‑conscious label “New Realism” largely disappeared, even as many of its central concerns—about perception, external reality, and the status of propositions—continued under different banners.

The transition thus involved both continuity (persistence of realist commitments) and discontinuity (changes in epistemological and methodological orientation).

14. Influence on Later Analytic Epistemology and Metaphysics

Although short‑lived as a movement, New Realism influenced the trajectory of analytic epistemology and metaphysics in several ways.

Normalizing Realist Assumptions

New Realism contributed to making robust realism about an external world a default assumption in much Anglophone philosophy. By mounting sustained attacks on Anglo‑American idealism and articulating a detailed realist alternative, it helped shift the background against which later analytic debates arose. Subsequent discussions of perception, causation, and scientific realism often proceeded without needing to defend the basic existence of a mind‑independent world.

Shaping Debates on Perception and Sense‑Data

New Realism’s rejection of sense‑data and mental intermediaries set the stage for later analytic debates about:

• the nature of perceptual experience;
• the possibility of direct realism versus sense‑data and phenomenal theories;
• how to account for illusion and hallucination.

Mid‑20th‑century discussions, including those by C. D. Broad and later Roderick Chisholm, J. L. Austin, and others, often revisited issues first foregrounded in New Realist polemics, even when the movement itself was not explicitly cited.

Propositions, Relations, and Metaphysical Structure

New Realism’s commitment to the reality of relations and the ontological status of propositions anticipated and influenced later analytic work on:

• the nature of facts, states of affairs, and truthmakers;
• the structure of propositions and their role as bearers of truth;
• the metaphysics of universals and relations.

While later theorists developed more refined logical and semantic tools, many of the questions they addressed—about what propositions are and how they relate to the world—had been framed in explicitly realist terms by New Realists.

Relation to Scientific Realism and Naturalism

New Realists’ effort to align philosophy with the natural sciences without collapsing it into empiricism foreshadowed later forms of scientific realism and metaphysical naturalism. Their insistence that successful scientific theories describe a world of entities and structures independent of our minds resonated with mid‑ and late‑20th‑century debates about:

• the reality of theoretical entities;
• the status of unobservable structures posited by physics;
• the legitimacy of metaphysics informed by, but not reducible to, empirical science.

In these respects, New Realism functioned as an early expression of themes that would become central to analytic philosophy’s mature discussions of knowledge and reality.

15. Legacy and Historical Significance

New Realism’s legacy is less that of a lasting school and more that of a pivotal transitional episode in the reorientation of Anglophone philosophy.

Dislodging Anglo‑American Idealism

Historically, New Realism played a significant role in the decline of absolute idealism in the United States and Britain. Its collective manifestos and polemical writings provided organized opposition to idealist orthodoxy, contributing to a broader shift toward realist and analytic frameworks. Even critics of New Realism often accepted its basic anti‑idealist conclusions.

Contributing to the Formation of Analytic Philosophy

The movement is frequently situated within the early history of analytic philosophy, alongside Moore and Russell. Its focus on:

• clarity about propositions and relations;
• object‑centered accounts of knowledge;
• and engagement with science

made it a precursor to later analytic methods, even if it lacked fully developed formal tools. Historians regard it as part of the “analytic turn” away from speculative system‑building and toward conceptually precise inquiry.

Stimulating Alternative Realisms

New Realism also stimulated alternative realist approaches, most notably critical realism and various phenomenological realisms. By provoking critiques from pragmatists, idealists, and phenomenologists, it catalyzed more nuanced accounts of perception, cognition, and the subject–object relation. These developments shaped the diversity of realist positions in 20th‑century epistemology and metaphysics.

Historiographical Assessment

Contemporary scholars generally view New Realism as:

• a distinct historical construct with clear programmatic texts and a relatively short lifespan;
• philosophically important for raising problems about perception, error, and propositions that continued to preoccupy analytic philosophers;
• limited by relatively underdeveloped logical and linguistic resources and by what some regard as an overly “naïve” conception of direct knowledge.

Despite these limitations, New Realism is now studied as a crucial chapter in the story of how Anglophone philosophy moved from late 19th‑century idealism to mid‑20th‑century analytic realism, helping to establish enduring questions about mind‑independent reality, directness of knowledge, and the metaphysics of relations.