Despite some notable similarities between the scientific realisms of Sellars and Peirce (such as both being anti-representationalist and future-directed), in his mature work Science and Metaphysics, Sellars explicitly critiqued Peirce’s account of truth as lacking “an intelligible foundation” (SM: vii). In this paper, I explore Sellars’ proposed remedy to Peirce’s purported lack, in his complex and enigmatic account of picturing – a non-discursive ‘mapping’ of the world. I argue that although Sellars’ development of this idea is largely sound, much of what he charges Peirce’s philosophy with missing is actually present there. By means of his semiotic icon/index/symbol distinction, Peirce manages to develop a philosophy of language which effectively coordinates the real order and the order of signification within the very structure of the proposition as he understands it, by contrast to Sellars’ claim that the two orders are merely connected by ‘analogy’. I also argue that in between Sellars’ ambitious account of veridicality, which appears to anticipate a form of scientific self-mensuration, and the dismissive ‘anti-truth’ quietism of neopragmatists such as Rorty, Peirce’s “contrite fallibilism” (Peirce CP 1.14) charts a wise middle path.

Lane argues that Charles Peirce’s philosophy can contribute to contemporary debates about the metaphysical and moral status of prenatal humans. Some participants in those debates view an early embryo as numerically identical to, and as having the same moral status as, the adult to which it gives rise; bioethicists in this camp tend to maintain that our metaphysical and moral judgments about prenatal humans are capable of objective truth. Others argue from the continuity of prenatal development to the view that metaphysical judgments about when beings like us begin to exist and moral judgments about when beings like us attain moral status cannot be objective. Lane argues that Peirce provides the resources for developing alternative positions. Those resources are Peirce’s synechism, according to which continuity is of central importance in philosophy, his scholastic realism, according to which there are real kinds, his basic realism, according to which there is a world that is the way it is apart from how anyone represents it to be, and his pragmatic clarifications of the concepts of reality and truth.

The final chapter ends the book with a discussion about when do images still matter despite their abundance and why images have an ambivalent relationship with reality. Can we distinguish between images that reflect reality, manipulate reality, or help us imagine an alternative reality? Can we talk of a ‘good’ image, a powerful one that lives on, and invites dialogue? Can we talk of a ‘just’ image? We want images that do us justice, whether it is for our personal memories or grieving, or for our collective identity and society.

Focusing on Plato’s literary craft and philosophical method, this chapter explores the Republic and especially the Allegory of the Cave to elucidate Plato’s vision of education, truth, and reality. Rather than isolating arguments in abstraction, it emphasizes the dialogical form of Plato’s works and the exemplary character of Socrates as a model of philosophical life. Set against the backdrop of Athenian democratic decline and the execution of Socrates, the chapter interprets the cave allegory as a meditation on the soul’s ascent from illusion to truth – a journey of intellectual habituation requiring ethical transformation. The analysis shows how Plato fused literary beauty with metaphysical depth, presenting philosophy as both a rational and existential undertaking. The chapter further demonstrates how Socratic inquiry – marked by aporia and dialectic – encourages readers to examine their assumptions, seek truth, and reflect on their moral formation. Plato’s theory of Forms is introduced not as a rigid metaphysical doctrine but as part of a broader vision in which education, justice, and contemplation all point toward transcendent reality. In this framing, philosophy becomes a way of life rooted in example, narrative, and spiritual aspiration.

This essay brings together the Jamesian will to believe with Coleridge’s famous description of the willing suspension of disbelief to offer a theory of fiction as a real-making practice. It begins by situating James’s writing on belief in relation to his thoughts on the “sense of reality” and then drawing out some distinctive features of his approach: For instance, instead of treating reality like an on/off switch (something is either real or it’s not), he treats it like a dial that can be turned up and down in volume. Belief is less about specific doctrines, for James, and more about the fundamental stance through which reality is perceived or rendered. The second part of the essay tests this Jamesian perspective against a novel that is itself about the relation between fiction and belief: J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. It ends by specifying the particular place of literary fictions within the broader category of belief and asking if literary critics are best thought of as believers, knowers, or both.

‘Truth’ refers to reality – what is, was, will be, and should be – and its aspects, in the context of representations thereof. A true something is the real thing, and a true proposition, belief, hypothesis, exemplar, and so forth is a successful representation of truth in the first sense. The virtue of truthfulness is the judicious love of truth in both senses. From love of reality and correct representations of it, the truthful person tends to tell others the truth as she sees it, but is not fanatical about telling it, because virtues like justice, compassion, and gentleness, which themselves are a kind of truth, can enjoin the withholding or even distortion of truths. Truths can be horrible, and it can take courage and humility to admit them.

Suggestions of a processual orientation in Collingwood’s thought can be found in certain places in his corpus, but Collingwood is not generally known as a process philosopher. This is likely because the Libellus de Generatione, in which he develops a process-oriented ontology, has long been unavailable and thought lost. While a copy was found and is housed in the Bodleian Library, it was only made publicly available in 2019. This chapter explicates the process ontology developed in the Libellus and contextualizes it in relation to Collingwood’s wider corpus and to early twentieth-century process philosophy. Drawing on Sandra Rosenthal, I argue that Collingwood’s understanding of process is closer to Bergson’s than Whitehead’s, especially in ways that allow for genuine novelty and creation, and in its implications for the metaphysics of time. I then discuss implications of this process ontology for the view of Collingwood as an idealist and for other areas of his philosophy. Finally, I consider whether attributing a processual ontology to Collingwood is in tension with his own view of “metaphysics without ontology.”

This chapter explores some understudied affinities between the essay and psychoanalysis as practices of living and writing. Pointing to a shared commitment to living a more ‘real’, or more vivid life, and the developmental task of coming to face reality for oneself, the chapter focuses on the way the ‘middle group’ of psychoanalysts in twentieth-century Britain – which included D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan – drew on the resources of the essay form, and the literary culture of Romanticism, in order to develop a particularly essayistic mode of psychoanalytic writing and practice. The chapter makes the case that the essay is particularly suited to exploring just what is distinctive about psychoanalytic therapeutic experience. It concludes with a more extended study of the career of Milner in the context of the development of the British welfare state, as she transitioned from essay writing to clinical practice.

Clinicians and patients have varying degrees of comfort in discussing prognosis. Patients can swing between worry or understanding that death is near and hope or optimism that lets them live life. This prognostication awareness pendulum may require a clinician negotiate the discussion over time. The cognitive roadmap for prognosis discussion is ADAPT (Ask what they know about their medical condition, Discover what they want to know about prognosis, Anticipate ambivalence, Provide information about what to expect, and Track emotion and respond with empathy). Some patients want prognostic information, some don’t, and some are ambivalent. While respecting their wishes, exploring why in each of these scenarios may be helpful to understand their concerns and how best to address them. Be aware that patients and their family members may have different prognostic information needs. Having separate conversations (with permission) may be in order. When they are concerned about destroying hope or prognosis is uncertain, using the frame of “hope and worry” can be helpful. Finally, when patients or family members don’t believe our prognosis, be curious as to why and focus on the relationship.

This essay examines the link between eros and metaphysics in “The Seducer’s Diary.” It argues that Johannes approaches seduction as a performative rather than strategic medium, in which the goal is not conquest but a way of playing with reality. The diary, on this reading, allows us to explore the erotic structure of our most fundamental experiences of mediation and serves as a key to understanding the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic existence.

This chapter discusses the absence from Longus of institutionalised community religion and of one of its central elements, priests, who (like priestesses) are found in the other four novels. A reason for this might be that some rural cults ran themselves and thus differed from polis-based religion. The only character within the story eligible for description as a holy man is Philetas: he has a very close relationship with Eros, who watches over him. The story’s narrator, however, relates in the preface how a shadowy exegetes explained the paintings in the Nymph’s grove: yet this exegetes, on whose say-so the novel’s four books are offered, lacks authority. Longus reverses the novelistic trope of supporting his story by a Beglaubigungsapparat: instead his exegetes’ interpretations of the painting’s scenes leave the reader quite uncertain about the reality of their world.

This chapter surveys literary criticism during the high phase of modernism with special focus on major critics’ conflicting attitudes toward reality. I show that the word reality is of central importance in our understanding of the era’s literary culture. Critics largely agreed that reality is the best touchstone to test the worth of a literary work, but they disagreed over what made some literary works more real than others. Their contrasting definitions of reality resulted in different ways to construct the literary canon.

Rooted in automatism, surrealism spawned a new kind of autobiographical writing, beginning in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. This new style of autobiographical writing sprang from a desire to identify a lived experience that comprised both waking life and the rich world of unconscious dreams and images. Functioning like Dorothea Tanning’s mirror-door, her preferred metaphor for painting, surrealist autobiographical writing is rooted in everyday reality, within which surreal experiences may surge. Only the autobiographical mode could encompass the multiple voices of surrealism and provide readers with the chance to discover surrealist principles as the surrealists discovered them themselves. This chapter presents a short history of surrealist autobiographical writing, from Robert Desnos’s Mourning for Mourning (1924) and Liberty or Love! (1927), to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937), Michel Leiris’s Manhood (1939), Leonora Carrington’s House of Fear (1938), The Oval Lady (1939), and Down Below (1944), Tanning’s Birthday (1986), and Kay Sage’s unfinished China Eggs (1955; published in 1996). These texts show artists and writers seeking self-realization through self-knowledge in the hope of fulfilling Rimbaud’s injunction to ’change life’.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s transcendental approach to social ontology with that found in Husserl. I argue that Husserl and Heidegger are united by the idea that ’the world’ or ’transcendence’ constitutes the most basic form of intersubjectivity, but that their different understandings of the concept of the world lead to divergent conceptions of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In short, Husserl takes the world to involve irreducible references to others since perceptual objects can only appear as real or as transcendent if we assume that they possess an inexhaustive number of unperceived aspects that are, in principle, available to other (transcendental) subjects. Heidegger, on the contrary, rejects both Husserl’s interest in objectivity and his notion of the transcendental subject. Instead, he claims that Dasein’s relation to the world must be understood in terms of practical and affective engagement within a field of possibilities, that is, in terms of existential projections. Accordingly, the most basic form of intersubjectivity is found in the transcendental necessity that the same field of entities can be subjected to a multitude of existential projections.

What do we mean when we say that something is real? What ought we to mean? I offer the following definition, in the interest of making an operational notion of reality: an entity is real to the extent that there are operationally coherent activities that can be performed by relying significantly on its existence and its properties. Reality (in the sense of real-ness) conceived in this way is a matter of degrees, and it is domain-dependent. Real entities (or, realities) are mind-framed, and crafting better realities is an achievement of conceptual engineering. When we take ontology in the context of practices, ontological pluralism no longer appears absurd: there are different sets of realities operative in different systems of practice. I illustrate these points with a range of examples drawn from the history of the physical sciences. The traditional picture of physical objects constituted as mereological sums of immutable building-blocks is unwarranted and creates undue hindrance to practice-based ontology.

‘Scientific realism’ has somehow come to designate a fundamentally unrealistic doctrine claiming for humans an ability to gain true knowledge about an ultimately inaccessible kind of reality. This unrealistic notion actually does harm by setting science an impossible task, inviting disappointment and challenges to its authority. This book offers an operational ideal of scientific inquiry inspired by the tradition of pragmatism: thinking about what we do in real practices offers ways of reconceiving the very notions of truth and reality so that they become achievable ideals and provide guidance for real scientific progress.

There is a tendency, at least among secular readers, to bracket off Dante’s faith as something no longer true, something to which we no longer subscribe. Yet that would seem to miss not just an aspect of the Divine Comedy, but its central point. The episodes in the Inferno this volume focuses on, paradigmatic for the whole work, point to a problem of faith – lack of a shared belief, misreadings of important stories, failed allegiance, and broken promises. But it is the choice of Virgil as a guide, lost because of his belief in “false and lying gods,” that teaches us how to read ancient books whose culture we no longer share. How indeed can we believe in them?

The COVID-19 pandemic brought significant changes to student experiences. A sudden switch to an online learning mode may serve as a natural experiment for the educational system. In this chapter, we test four "promises" of online education, which were widely discussed before the pandemic. Based on survey data of 5,464 undergraduate students from eight Russian universities, we compare the expectations to the reality of online learning. As the results show, the massive forced transition to online learning gave students more time to sleep, but they are not less tired than in traditional educational formats. Students find it difficult to ask questions, focus their attention when an instructor delivers material and find a comfortable place for studying. Consequently, the majority of students estimate their learning as ineffective. Relying on these results, we formulate lessons learned from this natural experiment.

This chapter on Wuthering Heights (1848) explores the work carried out by the verbs in the novel. Emily Brontë’s style makes evocative use of imperatives, and of active and passive verb forms. A distinction is drawn between the predominant verb forms of the first and second parts of the novel, so that the second half seems more passive and reactive, and therefore to indicate suffering. The imperative often calls an action into being, all the more so when compliance with an imperative is then assumed rather than narrated, as it frequently is in the novel. In this way, the imperative is like fiction itself, bringing into existence an imagined state of affairs; in this analysis, the style of Wuthering Heights starts to seem conversant with the novel’s shifts between its own imagined world and the reality of ours or its first readers to which it appeals.