Insidious Realism

What do I mean by 'insidious realism'? The phrase is intended to refer to certain kinds of realist assumptions that lurk all over the place in philosophy. Wittgenstein was extremely good at sniffing them out, and even better at dismantling the imaginary pictures that encourage them. Think, for example, of his various assaults on the platonic imaginings that infect philosophical accounts of mathematics. Though here, it might be better to speak of imaginary, imaginary pictures because we our imaginations cannot conjure up pictures of, say, an infinite series of numbers. But, more next time!