Perspectives on contemporary realism: continuity and rupture in current philosophy

Dialektika invites the international philosophical community to contribute to the special issue titled Perspectives on Contemporary Realism: Continuity and Rupture in Current Philosophy, an editorial project dedicated to examining the diverse ways in which recent philosophical thought has confronted the question of the real.

In an intellectual landscape marked by the legacies of constructivism and postmodern critique, and by the impact of digital technologies, contemporary realisms have emerged as one of the most fertile and controversial poles of philosophical debate. After decades in which the linguistic turn and the hermeneutics of suspicion relativized the question of the real, several schools now argue for a rethink of ontology beyond the exclusive mediation of the subject and discursive frameworks. Among them stand out New Realism, Speculative Realism, Scientific Realism, and Dissident Realisms (critical, political, and decolonial).

In this context, New Realism, whose main interlocutors are Maurizio Ferraris and Markus Gabriel, upholds the existence of dimensions of the world independent of interpretation, emphasizing objectivity as a condition of truth. Against Nietzsche's claim that "there are no facts, only interpretations," this movement contends that ontology precedes epistemology and that the world resists subjective manipulation. Within this framework, Ferraris's theory of documentality and Gabriel's critique of correlationism constitute key contributions to a realism that recognizes the world's independence from human interpretation.

Speculative Realism, represented by Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, begins with the critique of correlationism and the acknowledgment of the absolute contingency of being. Meillassoux exposes the limits of thought trapped within the subject–world correlation and reclaims the notion of the ancestral, understood as that which precedes any consciousness. Harman, meanwhile, develops object-oriented ontology, decentering the subject and proposing that object–object interactions constitute an autonomous field of reality, independent of human experience.

Scientific Realism, for its part, defends the ontological independence of the entities posited by scientific theories against extreme constructivist approaches. While recognizing the finitude of human knowledge, it maintains that science discovers the complexity of the world rather than constructs it. Its insights are particularly relevant for contemporary debates on artificial intelligence, biotechnology, neuroscience, and the ecological crisis, where the truth of studied entities is at stake beyond social discourse.

Likewise, Dissident Realisms—critical, political, and decolonial—interrogate Eurocentric and modern biases in the construction of the real, proposing situated and plural ontologies. From Latin America, Africa, and other contexts, they reclaim experiences and forms of knowledge that challenge Western epistemic hegemony. This realism does not deny the existence of the real but conceives it as a field of struggle, where historical, political, and cultural mediations are intertwined.

This dossier seeks to map these debates rigorously and pluralistically, attending to both their affinities and divergences.

These movements should not be read as a passing trend or an uncritical return to old realism. Their strength lies in their ambivalence: they are simultaneously rupture and continuity with contemporary thought. Rupture, because they reject the epistemological and linguistic closure that characterized much of postmodernism; continuity, because they incorporate critical suspicion and radicalize it toward new terrains, showing that access to the real cannot be detached from historical, political, and technocultural mediations. Thus, contemporary realisms constitute a conceptual laboratory in dialogue with science, politics, aesthetics, and technoculture, offering tools to address urgent problems of our time: the agency of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, bioethical dilemmas, and the disputes surrounding the decolonization of knowledge and the politicization of reality.

 

Editorial Guidelines

Articles must be original and unpublished, written in Spanish or English. Texts should be formatted in Times New Roman, size 12, 1.5 line spacing. Citations and bibliographic references must follow APA style, the latest edition. Each submission must include an abstract (up to 250 words) and a maximum of five keywords, both in the original language and in English.

For more details, consult the publication's Author Guidelines: http://bit.ly/4mkkH6Z

A brief biographical note (maximum 100 words) should also be attached, indicating institutional affiliation, main research lines, and ORCID number.

Submissions should be sent to:
[email protected] and [email protected]

Deadline for submissions: February 1, 2025

Editorial Team of Dialektika