Common Sense Realism

The Left Behind novels, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, illustrate how rapture fiction has become established as a highly successful sub-genre of Christian literature. However, their public reception – within popular and scholarly contexts – reflects an instrumentalisation of the novel that obscures their significance as cultural expressions of evangelical identity.  This article challenges this tendency, drawing from social scientific research into reader negotiation of texts within the evangelical world, and argues that both processes of engaging with the novels, and the novels themselves, mirror an evangelicalism that is not simple, univocal or homogeneous, but is complex and conflicted.

Abstract: Focusing mainly on a number of unpublished texts by Collingwood, especially his “Lectures on the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God, ” the study examines the English philosopher’s innovative interpretation of the Anselm’s main contribution to the philosophical-theological tradition. Collingwood insightfully shows how the ontological argument can be used in analyzing and discussing the religious experience, not in trying to formulate a logical proof of God’s existence. When abstracted from the individual’s practical religious life, that is, from the experience of prayer, worship, and the like, mind’s awareness of God cannot be understood. Resorting mainly to Anselm, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes, Collingwood argues that the externality of the Platonic absolute is that of an absolute transcendent whereas the Christian God is not only conceived as the transcendent cause of all things, but also as the immanent spirit in them. By asserting the unity of the min...

This paper aims to challenge the idea claimed by Putnam in his Dewey Lectures that internal realism presupposed sense data theory so that it would have been unable to account for the fundamental intuition of common sense realism that perception gives us cognitive access to reality. Rather, I argue that Putnam’s writings from the period of internal realism indicate that it (internal realism) already presupposed a form of direct realism of the kind he puts forth in the Dewey lectures. I support my thesis with a demonstration of the implication of direct realism in the refutation of the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis that occurs in the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History, as well as with various passages from the philosopher’s writings of the time when he defended internal realism. I also argue, contrary to what the philosopher seems to assert in his Dewey Lectures, that his model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism does not involve sense data theory. After noting the very strong resemblance between the theses of his common sense realism of the 1990s and those of his internal realism of the 1980s, I hypothesize that Putnam pretended to renounce internal realism in order to allow himself to rephrase his original position so as to avoid being misinterpreted as a form of idealism or fact constructivism, as was the case with his initial statement.