Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun One who is inclined to literal truth and pragmatism.
  • noun A practitioner of artistic or philosophic realism.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A logician who holds that the essences of natural classes have some mode of being in the real things: in this sense distinguished as a scholastic realist; opposed to nominalist.
  • noun A philosopher who believes in the real existence of the external world as independent of all thought about it, or, at least, of the thought of any individual or any number of individuals.
  • noun In literature and art, a believer in or a practiser of realism; one who represents persons or things as he conceives them to be in real life or in nature; an opponent of idealism or romanticism.
  • noun One who advocates technical as opposed to classical education; one who upholds the method of the real-schools.
  • Of or pertaining to realism; realistic; naturalistic.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Philos.) One who believes in realism; esp., one who maintains that generals, or the terms used to denote the genera and species of things, represent real existences, and are not mere names, as maintained by the nominalists.
  • noun (Art. & Lit.) An artist or writer who aims at realism in his work. See Realism, 2.
  • noun a person who avoids unrealistic or impractical beliefs or efforts. Contrasted to idealist or visionary.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun philosophy An advocate of realism; one who believes that matter, objects etc. have real existence beyond our perception of them.
  • noun One who believes in seeing things the way they really are, as opposed to how they would like them to be.
  • noun art, literature An adherent of the realism movement; an artist who seeks to portray real everyday life accurately.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a person who accepts the world as it literally is and deals with it accordingly
  • noun a painter who represents the world realistically and not in an idealized or romantic style
  • noun a philosopher who believes that universals are real and exist independently of anyone thinking of them

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From real +‎ -ist.

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