NEOREALISM. – An Anglo-American philosophical-scientific trend that fits into the broader contemporary “realism” movement, distinct from classical realism of Greek and medieval philosophy, whose metaphysical dualism of subject and object it abandons or denies; the object, though acknowledged as real independently of the subject, is not an entity different from it (metaphysical monism). Neorealism thus opposes idealism and also pragmatism and Bergson’s intuitionism, which makes the object a content of subjective consciousness, whether empirical or transcendental. Yet neorealism reduces, on the one hand, consciousness to a physical event, a thing among things (consciousness is one among many groups of external relations among real entities), and on the other hand it identifies the objectivity of knowledge with scientific knowledge, without escaping subjectivism.
English neorealism, besides minor figures such as J. Laird and C. D. Broad (both professors at Cambridge) and the major figure of S. Alexander (born in Australia), includes G. E. Moore (b. 1874), formerly professor at Cambridge, and B. Russell (b. 1872), who was associated with Moore at the same university. Besides *Principia Ethica* (London 1903) and *Ethics* (ibid. 1912), Moore wrote several essays for *Mind* (some later collected in *Philosophical Essays*, London 1922), the most significant being “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903). For Moore, what is experienced is not identical with experience (with appearing to a subject); indeed, in sensation and idea we are not conscious of something objective that is distinct from our act of perceiving and thinking. The objective reality of the pen with which I write, for example, does not depend on my perception. The fact that I am conscious of it does not mean that the real fact depends on this mental act; consciousness is a “transparent medium,” a kind of mirror in which the experienced object presents itself as it is outside consciousness. There is thus a mutual independence between physical facts and mental or conscious facts.
Russell’s position is more complex. Besides recent studies on political, social, and moral problems, he expounded his logical doctrine in *The Principles of Mathematics* (Cambridge 1905), restated in the celebrated three-volume *Principia Mathematica* (ibid. 1910–13), written in collaboration with Whitehead (q.v.), and his “scientific philosophy” in numerous works (*The Problems of Philosophy*, London 1912; *Our Knowledge of the External World*, Chicago and London 1914; *Analysis of Mind*, London 1921; *Analysis of Matter*, ibid. 1927, etc.). For Russell too, objective entities are distinct from subjective consciousness with which they stand in relation: objects are what and where the mind says they are, and independent of II. All sense-data have equal value, and there are no “illusions” of the senses. Every subject has its own perspective; the sensible world is the system of all possible perspectives. Yet for Russell the reality of other subjects besides my own is a hypothesis: we believe in it only because such belief is natural. Moreover, for Russell (whose philosophical system is a mélange of human empiricism, Leibnizian metaphysics, and fancy), the subject is a logical fiction employed only for grammatical convenience. The radical subjectivism that persists in him beneath an apparent objectivism and realism leads him to found ethics on desires (*Religion and Science*, London 1936): to say that a thing is good is a way of saying “I like it,” and to say that another is bad is to express a different subjective attitude toward II. These are not objective, true or false statements but personal desires. Ethics has the task of promoting those positive desires that generate happiness and weakening those that generate unhappiness. As for logical doctrines, Russell showed that mathematics is the logic of scientific knowledge, but he claimed to identify logic with mathematics, as if to reduce all knowledge to scientific knowledge. This is uncritical scientism, characteristic of one with scientific rather than philosophical interests, not unaccompanied by a certain cultural superficiality, as is shown by *History of Western Philosophy* (London 1946), rich in scope but not in depth.
North American neorealism is more naive, as seen in the collaborative volume *The New Realism* (New York 1912) by Ed. B. Holt, W. T. Marvin, W. P. Montague, R. B. Perry, W. B. Pitkin, and E. G. Spaulding. Mathematical logic shows that the same term can belong to different sets without being thereby altered. If the idealist principle “to be is to be perceived” were true, the relation would have to modify the terms it constitutes. Instead, it does not alter the known objects at all; their reality is therefore not exhausted in the relation and is independent. Not *esse est percipi* but *percipi est esse*. The world is a collection of simple entities (mental, physical, real, unreal, good or bad, sensations, conceptual entities of mathematics and science) to which it is indifferent whether they belong to the complex “consciousness,” since they can simultaneously belong to other infinite complexes while remaining what they are. The neorealists maintain (without proof) a radical monism: spirit and matter are not two substances but two different groupings of simple entities; consciousness is not defined by the nature of its particular elements but by the particular way in which elements are grouped. It is a group of neutral entities selected by the nervous system, which reacts with a corresponding response. Just as a spotlight (in Holt’s image) illuminates now this, now that section of a landscape and makes one group of objects part of the illuminated section and another part of the dark section, so the nervous system, obeying its vital interests, directs consciousness now to one, now to another group of objects. In other words, the nervous system, among the innumerable entities of the universe, selects and cuts out those that serve the conservation and development of itself and the organism. The so-called illusions and errors (also objective facts) are due to a cut made by the nervous system that does not correspond to vital ends. How consciousness arises from this naturalistic monism remains a mystery that the neorealists’ simplism does not trouble to explain.