Idealism, New-Realism and Pragmatism: The American Debate on Reality from Royce to Lewis

In the first decades of the twentieth century new realistic tendencies arose in the United States as a reaction to the idealism dominating American academia. The foremost idealist at that time was Josiah Royce and the first realistic tendency against his idealism was directed by Ralph B. Perry and William P. Montague. In 1910 they promoted the manifesto of the American new realism. In this paper I offer an analysis of the debate that led to the birth of the new realism: it will provide a different perspective on the history of American philosophy and will open new reflections on the impact of the debate. In this debate “reality” was faced as an epistemological issue rather than an ontological one: the origin of this trend was an ambiguity in Royce’s work. Although initially new realists moved on the ground prepared by Royce, later they attempted to release the notion of reality from epistemology and to return it to metaphysics, claiming the priority of logic in both fields. However, the trend was definitively established by Clarence I. Lewis - a student of Royce and Perry at Harvard - who considered reality as the problem of the categories we use to speak correctly about our experience of the world. He established the rule that would be followed by the next generation of philosophers.