Realism, Mind and Evolution

Perceptual experience is perspectival and human minds occupy a variety of ‘viewpoints’. These considerations provide grounds for both realist and anti-realist philosophies. Each is represented in adjacent areas of thought and connect with familiar debates between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’, which in turn are related to disputes about religious and naturalistic accounts of the world and of the place of human beings within it. These have been joined from an orthagonal direction by Thomas Nagel in his recent book Mind and Cosmos. This is considered and contrasted with ideas of Aquinas before returning to the possibility of reconciling perspectivalism with an account of what it could mean to speak of the world as it is in itself.