author: Manuel de Landa content: Idealists have it easy. Their reality is uniformly populated by appearances or phenomena, structured by linguistic representations or social conventions, so they can feel safe to engage in metaphysical speculation knowing that the contents of their world have been settled in advance. Realists, on the other hand, are committed to assert the autonomy of reality from the human mind, but then must struggle to define what inhabits that reality. id: 2e2472f0-07df-40d8-87ea-bbbc3c4dc2c3