Some scholars claim that we live in a time of many new realisms, that with Kant, any contact to the outside world was lost. In this book, Jure Simoniti sets out to retrace another tendency in Western philosophy, arguing that the possibility of realism has always been there. Paradoxically, it is precisely Kant s practical subject, who, at the moment of becoming aware of the moral law within him, fixes his gaze upon the starry heavens and from the point of view of this immensity of worlds upon worlds appears to himself not as a monster of anthropomorphism, but as an animal creature. Simoniti argues that the epistemological self-inauguration of the subject goes hand in hand with its anthropological dethronement, and the god-like centrality of the ego is constantly outbalanced with its creatural marginality, becoming a vanishing point at the edge of a foreign universe. It seems that the subject only assumes the role of ratio essendi for the whole of reality, the role of the I, the spirit, the worker, the Ubermensch, or even the shepherd of being, in order to behold his empirical existence in the mirror of a non-anthropomorphic, pre-human world. However, with these precarious equilibria, the conditions of possibility of realism have become more complex and intricate. The book pursues the furtive paths on which every realism-inhibiting operation of totalization of the object field performs behind its back an operation of the release of a reality, which is not presupposed by the self-consciousness and is not constituted linguistically. This book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars in the fields of German idealism, continental philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.
