"It is clear that every immediate object of our senses both exists and is real in the primary meaning of these terms so long as we remain aware of the object"
About this Quote
Broad is quietly detonating a landmine under common sense and then offering to rebuild it, piece by piece, with philosophical caution tape around the blast zone. His line sounds like reassurance - what you see is real - but it’s a conditional kind of comfort: real "so long as we remain aware". The bait is the everyday confidence of perception; the switch is that reality gets pegged to awareness rather than to an independent world chugging along offstage.
The phrase "primary meaning" is doing heavy work. Broad isn’t denying tables and sunsets; he’s policing definitions. In the most basic, phenomenological sense, the immediate object of sense (the patch of color, the felt warmth, the heard note) has a kind of unassailable existence while it’s present to consciousness. That move quarantines skepticism: you can doubt whether there’s a mind-independent tree causing your experience, but you can’t doubt the experience as it is experienced without changing the subject.
Context matters: Broad is writing in a 20th-century British tradition obsessed with disentangling sense-data, perception, and physical objects, in the wake of Moore and Russell and with Hume’s shadow still looming. The subtext is methodological humility. He’s not granting metaphysical victory to idealism; he’s creating a stable starting point for inquiry. Reality here isn’t a trophy awarded to the external world; it’s a status temporarily secured by attention - a reminder that philosophy begins, embarrassingly, with what’s right in front of our mental nose.
The phrase "primary meaning" is doing heavy work. Broad isn’t denying tables and sunsets; he’s policing definitions. In the most basic, phenomenological sense, the immediate object of sense (the patch of color, the felt warmth, the heard note) has a kind of unassailable existence while it’s present to consciousness. That move quarantines skepticism: you can doubt whether there’s a mind-independent tree causing your experience, but you can’t doubt the experience as it is experienced without changing the subject.
Context matters: Broad is writing in a 20th-century British tradition obsessed with disentangling sense-data, perception, and physical objects, in the wake of Moore and Russell and with Hume’s shadow still looming. The subtext is methodological humility. He’s not granting metaphysical victory to idealism; he’s creating a stable starting point for inquiry. Reality here isn’t a trophy awarded to the external world; it’s a status temporarily secured by attention - a reminder that philosophy begins, embarrassingly, with what’s right in front of our mental nose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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