What is the New Realism?

Abstract

The paper presents the main ideas elaborated as a part of Italian philosophical current named new realism, which is some ontological and social theory, that arises as a reaction to epistemological and political constructivism and postmodernism. The themes of the article include the ontological status of reality (and its characteristics such as unamendability, the ability to resist to conceptual schemes, and “affordance”), the prevalence of ontology over epistemology, the relation between the experience of the senses and reality and, in this connection, a peculiar ontological value of the recovery of aesthetics as a theory of perception, the relation between knowledge and world, specifity of social objects, which have documentality as their foundation.