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Reality

Get Real

Paul Doolan reveals that the real problem with ‘the real world’ is knowing what ‘real’ really means.

It seems to me that we encounter two serious philosophical problems when we thoughtlessly use the term ‘the real world’. Firstly, what is ‘the world’? It is this problem that Ludwig Wittgenstein confronted in the opening sentences of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922):

1 The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.