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philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.

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Is utopianism necessarily unrealistic?

Is it just wishful thinking?

Some political philosophers draw a distinction between realism in

political theory with its aim of exposing politics as it actually is, and

utopianism which offers a vision for how political arrangements could be.

Raymond Goyce of Cambridge University says it's perfectly possible to be a realist utopian.

Raymond Goyce, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

Good morning. The topic we're going to focus on today is realism in political philosophy.

I wonder if you could start by just saying what realism

means in this context. It seems to me there are at least three different senses

in which the term realism is used. There's a strictly philosophical sense in which

it's used in which it designates either something metaphysical or something epistemological.

It means either that we see things directly,

that's a kind of epistemological realism,

or it means that universals really exist,

...