ABSTRACT
Generally philosophy has been irrealist. In fact I think Hegel would not have been wrong if he had described the history of philosophy as that of explicit idealism and implicit realism.1 In any event, as I have already claimed that realism is inexorable, and in this chapter I am going to argue that philosophy has the aspect of a socially conditioned causally efficacious relational dialectic, philosophical irrealism constitutes a prima facie paradox.
