New Realism: A Short Introduction

New realism is perhaps the only philosophical movement of which one may indicate the exact date of birth: it was June 23, 2011 at 13.30 at the restaurant “Al Vinacciolo” in Via Gennaro Serra 29, Naples. I can be so accurate because I was there, with Markus Ga-briel and his Italian collaborator Simone Maestrone, after a seminar at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies. Markus was founding an international centre of philosophy in Bonn and wanted to inaugurate it with a big conference. I told him that the right title would have been “New Realism”, since it captured what in my opinion was the fundamental character of contemporary philosophy: a certain weariness of postmodernism and the belief that everything is constructed, by language, conceptual schemes and the media. Well, it is not like that: something, or rather, much more than we are willing to admit, is not constructed – and this is a wonderful thing, otherwise we could not distinguish dreams from reality. I announced the conference a few weeks later, in an article published in “La Repubblica” on August 8, 2011, and since then the debate has never ceased, both in Italy and abroad2, with contributions that include many of my writings on the subject,3 the book by Markus Gabriel4 and that by Mauricio Beuchot and José Luis Jerez.