Reality

Reality is that thing that is "more" than we can describe. This may come across as a rather trivial sentence, but it contains a challenging philosophical thesis: the world is more than what appears. Realism, which is actually a complex set of theories and metaphysical positions, starts here: from the acknowledgment of the distinction between "perception" and "reality." The whole history of Western philosophy, within an obvious system of recurring cycles, is a tightrope between positions that make the world depend on the subject who perceives it (from Pyrrho of Elis up to Schopenhauer) to theories that highlight the transcendence of the outside world (from Plato to Frege). From the standpoint of naive metaphysics, reality is the set of all the " objects " of the world (including, potentially, also all the " possible objects "). The argument that metaphysics, and therefore the analysis of reality, should deal with objects may appear controversial to those who argue, like Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that "the world is the totality of facts, not of things "(§1.1): this depends on the fact that in philosophy not only "things", but also "the analysis of things", are often more complex than we can imagine. In order to have a good working hypothesis, let's say that reality is the necessary level for all other levels to exists: it is the condition of possibility of any other thing (including the unreal and the surreal). Philosophy is not physics: therefore, rather than reality as such, it analyses our approach to reality. Arguing that there is an outside world that transcends the individuals who perceive it (realism) does not mean believing that what we see corresponds to what exists: the first false polarization between realism and anti-realism goes through this misconception. It is precisely because there are different ways of seeing reality that we can deduce that there is a level of reality that transcends these ways, and the very existence of this level distinguishes better interpretations from worse ones (Umberto Eco called them "overinterpretations").