How does philosophy go on? How does it go on, after its end? Heralds of its exhaustion, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, argued for the futility of determinate meaning, the incoherence of external reality, and did so under the banner of post-modernism. To have moved past modernism or past modernity was now to understand that there is no truth outside linguistic practices and that there is no objectivity beyond inter-subjectivity. A generation later, as the love of wisdom refuses to politely fade into obsolescence, the self-styled “bone-head realist” Crispin Sartwell asks whether there is a way out of the cul-de-sac, some kind of post-post-modernism that escapes post-modernism’s eulogy.

Leading the way out, are the new speculative realists, including Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, who argue that the trouble began with Kant’s critical philosophy itself. We need to reverse idealism to recover an unqualified realism or materialism resistant to the paralyzing preoccupations with mind’s limited access to truth. But how this will come about remains dubious so long as the arguments deployed continue along the Kantian lines of division between mind and matter, the ideal and the real. In Harman’s hands, the Kantian subject/object relation is grafted on to object/object relations along with the usual problems of necessarily inaccessible truths, producing a newfound realism which may prove more mysterious than post-modernism. And in Meillassoux’s, there is a similar tension, when he both argues for the pre-existence of material reality pre-dating the emergence of evolved human minds, yet soon after acknowledges that this arche-fossil reality still somehow depends on our own minds to conceive it. Is Dr. Johnson to eternally stub his toe without relief?

One alternative to Sartwell’s hope for a post-post-modernism may be a return to the fold of not-so-naive realism. Even as the idealists, then the modernists, and post-modernists irritated Dr. Johnson and other incredulous onlookers, there has been a current of equally philosophical realism that never really took Berkeley so seriously. Passing through Reid, Russell, Moore, then the positivists and today’s post-positivists, there have been and continue to be many forms of realism, including scientific realism and externalism, that do not preliminarily accept that reality is subordinate to consciousness. To be sure, there may not be so many realisms, but my point is just that there may be simpler ways to recover from post-modernism, simpler ways to refute idealism, simpler ways involving toes and hands.