The fundamental claim of new realism is not that what idealists take to be ideas are actually real things like trees and chairs. In fact, any new realist is perfectly aware of the merits of a coherent idealism and is far from indifferent to the charms of a new and reworked transcendentalism. The point is this: rather than an ontological commitment to the existence of given classes of beings (or as I prefer to say, of objects), new realism is the claim that such ontological commitment shouldn't leave the issue of reality to science, thereby limiting philosophy to a merely educational function. In this sense, the way in which new realism understands philosophy (that is, as a construction and a system, together with a clear ontological commitment) is much closer to nineteenth-century idealism than twentieth-century postmodernism.

I believe this is the right starting point for clarifying the function and scope of new realism in contemporary philosophy (to which I shall limit myself for lack of space, thereby leaving aside its scope in fields such as architecture, literature, pedagogy, art theory, political theory, social sciences, media studies and public discussion).

Nineteenth-century idealism. The twentieth century was a short century not only as far as history is concerned, but also philosophically speaking. At least until the First World War, there were fully coherent and widely accepted idealist systems in the philosophical community (this held true for the English-speaking world and Italy more than Germany, which had been the cradle of transcendental idealism at the beginning of the 1800s). It is against such systems that, as we know, twentieth-century thought went through the birth of what would later be called ‘analytic philosophy’. The raison d’être of the philosophy brought forward in England by Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore was the critique of neo-idealist systems, and specifically that of John Ellis McTaggart (1866–1925). It was a call for common sense and the ‘robust sense of the real’ thanks to which, in response to McTaggart's claim that time doesn't exist, Moore could object ‘I’ve just had breakfast’.