PROBAPOSSIBLE PROLEGOMENA TO IDEAREAL HISTORY

• probable ... possible: cf. Stephen's musings in Ulysses:"Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?" → Stephen's musings on Aristotle's metaphysics: "Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind."

• prolegomena: preliminary statements or introductory discourses → Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

• idealism: a philosophy in which only spiritual or mental elements are believed to be truly real → Plato and Immanuel Kant were idealists

• realism: a philosophy in which the material world of our sense perceptions is believed to be truly real, independent of our thoughts → Aristotle was a realist

• sidereal: of or pertaining to the stars