Abstract

In 1. I make explicit the understanding of philosophy, which allows me to address the question of realism from a philosophical perspective, while showing the limitations and strengths of this perspective. In 2. I deploy sense critique to defend the conception of the “realµ as “knowableµ (in the footsteps of Peirce) and thus to avoid the abstract identification of the real as “independent of usµ (as knowers, speakers, agents), recovered and radicalized by the continental Speculative Realism (SR). In 3. I briefly consider the proposals of the major representatives this scholarly strand (Brassier, Grant, Harman, Meillassoux), and highlight the deep internal divergences as well as the differences from New Materialism. In 4. I highlight the inadequacies of Cimatti’s objections, published in this very journal, to SR and in particular to the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), on which I also focus. In the central 5. I try to recover the initial determination of the “realµ as “knowableµ through a theoretical reconstruction in a pragmatic key of the 20 th -century linguistic turn, which, on the one hand does not configure the plural and varied languages (language games, interweaving of words and interactions) as inevitable screens or cages for access to the world or impersonal self-referential systems (as Cimatti and also Croce, again in this very journal, suggest), to couch them rather as indispensable sites of discussion, correction and revision of meanings (along the dimensions of external and internal experience, as well as the functioning of interactions), and, on the other hand, give account of the rich plurality of types of signs and languages used. In the short 6. I warn against the idealizing risks of my own anti-stylization of human languages, yet to point out that the factual limits of communication become evident precisely because of an open and varied conception of the use of language, or rather of the many languages, which invites neither to their overcoming or to a hierarchical arrangement of them nor to the recourse to a universal ideal community of communication.