Realism and its Rejection: Wittgenstein’s Copernican Revolution

Abstract

Realism is a philosophica. position which we are tempted to embrace in different connections — for instance in connection with the philosophical question of the existence of the physical world. Idealism is a reactio. to it and to the scepticism to which it provides a source: can we know the existence of the physical world, or any of the physical objects which comprise it? Idealism is thus one of its satellites, as is also scepticism. Within the space of its gravitational field there is no logical room for anything else. To open up a new space, an open space, realism has to be dismantle, and that means digging into the assumptions concealed behind it and subjecting them to criticism.