Is there any philosophical work that claims that "reality is as it seems", and that it is possible to make fairly accurate descriptions of things?
Is there any philosophical work that claims that "reality is as it seems"...
Andrew Jackson
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Easton Evans
reason and reality by sean sayers
Samuel Morris
oh and materalism and empirio criticism by lenin
Jayden Adams
empiricism
Xavier Allen
Oddly enough aspects of neo-Thomism and older forms of Aristotelianism are like that because they want to get past the Kantian/Cartesian dualism problem, by saying that the world and our thoughts about the world are part of the same reality, and therefore when we say "there's a chair over there" it basically does mean "there is a chair, there." The oldest forms of logical positivism sometimes have element of this as well because they wanted really naive "pictures" of "atomic facts" in the world.
But it should be pretty obvious that these positions are rare for a reason. They open themselves to all the nominalist and materialist critiques posed against Aristotelianism in the first place, in every era it was practiced. In fact they open themselves even more to those critiques, because at least dogmatic diehard Aristotelianism has its own metaphysics (energeia, a sort of god, etc.) that can justify its realism. If you want a kind of "agnostic realism" you're sort of fucked.
Most people who want what you're asking for end up as structural realists or scientific empiricists. But still, how do they deal with the nominalist and materialist reductio ad absurdum?
There's also pragmatism, which you might like. Maybe go read Dewey or something. But there are essentially two kinds of pragmatists: metaphysical pragmatists and shallow pragmatists. Shallow pragmatists tend to reduce pragmatism to the precept "if it helps us navigate the world, it's 'true'; therefore, if I say the chair is there, and act like the chair is there, and I can sit in the chair and have a pretty okay time of things, there's effectively a chair there until I am compelled to think otherwise." Whereas metaphysical pragmatists like William James might say things LIKE this, especially when they use American-style colloquial language and act like they're deflating highfalutin metaphysics with their down-to-earth "pragmatic" outlook, but their position is fundamentally a very subtle epistemological one that is still essentially structural realist. So again, the only way to avoid the nominalism/materialism problem is simply to be a shallow thinker.
Jace Morales
HEGEL
Henry Morris
Pyrrhonian (NOT Academic) Skepticism is just that, to a degree probably more extreme than you want.
Cooper Campbell
I should also mention Scottish common sense philosophy. Maybe look into Beatty, Reid. But again, at least Reid is being a lot more subtle than he seems.
Bentley Barnes
Not OP, Many thanks for this, going to look look further into it
Jacob Richardson
This is the exact metaphysical opinion of Ayn Rand
Alexander Allen
Noam Chomsky did an important lecture on just this topic:
m.youtube.com
Mason Davis
Aristotle.
Dominic Ward
I wouldn't really call any system of ideas that confidently asserts something that we cannot prove 'philosophy', it would be closer to religion/ideology.
Noah Lewis
Aquinas, following Aristotle, squarely fits that criteria.
Short intro may be found in Chesterton's Dumb Ox - a short bio of Aquinas that discusses his philosophy passim.
I think it's online at archive.org, or gutenberg.au.
Search for the word "ens" for relevant discussion of Aquinas philosophy of being and reality (in contradistinction to the ever-distancing moves away from reality that took place beginning with Kant's noumenon and surrounding apparatus.
Grayson Sullivan
Don't mean to sound negative but, why do people always ask for books that confirm opinions they already have? What's the point of reading a book that does nothing but put your intuitions into words?
Nathan Green
Not OP, but for me I do it to introspect. Your ideas and values can be vague, reading about similar opinions may help understand why you feel that way. Also, you might not agree with the whole philosophy, thereby it may present you a good challenge.
Zachary Edwards
Why do I feel like that it would be terrible if reality were exactly as it seems? The thought of it almost makes me angry.
Ryder Cruz
When it comes to philosophy, it is important to recognize that there are people who are FAR smarter than you who have been thinking about these things for a longer time than you and recognize issues and problems that you couldn't have guessed, and have had arguments with other smart people that go into a level of detail that your vague shower thoughts can't reach. What you typically find when you read deeper is that the debate is much richer and more complex than you realize and if you have any intellectual honesty you will likely feel at least at little challenged in your original presumptions.
It is a problem though when people read just one book defending their favorite position and completely ignore any well-reasoned responses to that book. But then people are easily satisfied that they're right, so it's not too surprising.
Adrian Watson
Reid and Searle
Nathan Roberts
G. E. Moore
Tyler Evans
Because a large part of human thinking is driven by a desire for hidden knowledge. We want to peel back the veil and see the secret workings of the world. If there are no such secrets, and everything is as it seems, we feel cheated out of a powerful source of intellectual motivation.
Christopher Hernandez
>reality is as it seems
Even the most hardcore materialist recognizes that we don't have access to the world unmediated by the senses. Everyone admits a degree of falliablism and even the most naively scientistic fedoralord recognizes that we can't possibly know everything about the universe.
Austin Martin
>what are optical illusions
>by the senses
It's not just the senses. The brain constructs a simulation of the world. The visual field for instance, is mostly represented by the brain's predictive processing--cached information of what it anticipates is there.
Ian Thompson
>I wouldn't really call any system of ideas that confidently asserts something that we cannot prove 'philosophy', it would be closer to religion/ideology.
>we can't possibly know everything about the universe.
What a confident assertion.
Nathan Rivera
>What a confident assertion.
Do you honestly believe we can know eg, the exact position of every particle in the universe before heat death, long after humans cease existing?
It takes FAR more unwarranted confidence to think that every single state of affairs in the history of the universe will be knowable by finitely existing ape brains, unless you take some religious view or whatever.