The various schools of contemporary philosophy have a fundamental similarity: realism. It is also their fatal flaw. Despite the defences of philosophers such as Timothy Williamson, the problem of self reference is inescapable when making statements about ‘the world.’ For this reason, realism has no future in philosophy argues Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel.

What exactly is philosophy in 2021 and what is its future? In trying to answer this question one loses oneself in the diversity of positions that each school claims are the most promising. Among all the philosophical currents in force today, should we privilege the most recent? For example, analytic metaphysics (Lowe, Tiercelin, etc.) which under the name of "ontological turn" has sought in recent years to perpetuate the supposedly analytic way of philosophizing, or speculative realism (Meillassoux, Brassier, etc.) which passes for being the continental version of the ontological renewal, and has itself produced different movements or subsets, such as flat ontology (Harman, Garcia) and neo-realism (Gabriel, Ferraris)? Or should we continue to rely on the great currents that marked the twentieth century, as contemporary supporters of phenomenology (Marion, Romano) and Wittgenstein's inveterate followers (Travis, Diamond) are wont to do?

But to choose between these currents would be to ignore a new fact: all of these philosophers, beyond their apparent opposition, claim the same position: realism. Faced with this quasi mass-phenomenon, a question arises: can this realism really be the future of philosophy, as so many recent philosophers of all stripes wish?

The desire to make realism the “unsurpassable horizon” of our philosophical time runs up against many objections.

Three common theses lie behind these different realist currents. Firstly, an ontological thesis: the real is everything that is independent because it is external and anterior to my representations, aims or cognitive schemas.  Secondly, an epistemological thesis: we can have an exact knowledge of this independent real. The skeptical or relativist suspicion (so common in the 1970s), that we cannot claim to have access to a real in itself, is discarded. Finally, a philosophical thesis about the definition of truth.  Truth is defined by the correspondence of my proposition to an external thing (facts, states of affairs or world posited as independent of my judgment). The reality outside me is what makes the truth of my proposition (the real is “truth-maker”).

But, the reader may ask, if these different currents agree on both what is real (independent and knowable) and what is the definition of truth (subordinated to an independent real), why do they fight on a bitter war? If they agree on what is real (by definition), they do not agree on what sorts of things are real - on the cases or individuals to which the concept applies. The real is that which is perceived (according to Austin’s heirs), or its is the material thing or the state of physical facts (for the physicalists, materialists, naturalists), or the famous “given” of the phenomenologists, the “forms of life” of the wittgensteinians, the essences of certain analytic metaphysicians or any object including the unicorn as the partisans of the flat ontology claim? These differences, however, do not alter the profound unanimity which, through their three shared theses, has made the independent, knowable and “truth-making” real the new Eldorado of philosophy.

Yet this desire to make realism the “unsurpassable horizon” of our philosophical time runs up against many objections.

 1) If philosophers are defined as having the "real" as their exclusive field of investigation, what are other disciplines (physics, sociology, etc.) about, and what is specific to the philosophical approach?