Alamo-Girl, I didn't know you were into these areas. I agree entirely with what you say.
Worth reading for the situation we find ourselves in are the later books of Alastair MacIntyre, written after his conversion from Marxism, especially his two key books, "After Virtue," and "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" He plausibly suggests that we have three camps or communities in the contemporary western world: traditionalists, modernists, and postmodernists, and that they all talk past each other because their fundamental premises or axioms are from entirely different worlds and do not overlap.
We have certainly witnessed that phenomenon on numerous Darwin threads in the forum, where the Darwinists simply repeat the same mantras again and again, rather than respond to their opposition's arguments. I think that was because they simply couldn't SEE the arguments. Their world view (Weltanschauung) doesn't permit them to. Their answer is pure and simple: Darwin is science; if you disagree with Darwinism you are hopelessly ignorant; so we will turn to the activist courts to prevent you from passing your superstitious ignorance on to the next American generation.
Another book I'd recommend is by Thomas Nagel, who is said to be one of the three or four top living philosophers.
http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasnagel
He is an agnostic, but he is also a truth seeker, as few philosophers are in today's academia. His book "The Last Word" is an effort to understand how, in a purely material world without God, there can be such a thing as universal knowledge. And why does the order of the universe seem to correspond to the order of our thinking? He comes very close to admitting what he cannot, as an agnostic philosopher, admit: that the only way to account for universal knowledge that can be communicated in objective language is religious. Indeed, that something like the Logos is necessary. He does not make that jump, but his book has been much discussed in religious circles by Christian philosophers, for example in a Catholic academic journal I get called, coincidentally, Logos.
Although somewhat off the immediate subject, two other books I have found extremely valuable in thinking about the nature of reality are Lynch's "Christ and Apollo," and Ralph McInerny's "Aquinas and Analogy." The latter is highly specialized but I think more important than most academic books. Incidentally, McInerny also writes detective novels.
Much of this boils down to the meaning of the word realism. In classical philosophy, the real is what lies behind the phenomena. In modernist philosopy, the real is the material. But modernist philosophy is incapable of sustaining that argument, and degenerates into scholastic specialization that has made most academic philosophy departments completely irrelevant to the real world.
I should add that postmodernist philosophy is even more hopeless. It posits that there is no objective reality; everything is relative; "truth" is meaningless; and therefore that the purpose of academic argument is to change the language so that everyone is forced to agree with what you say.
That's basically what Heidegger, who lies behind the more popular Derrida and outweighs him, did. It has been said that if you spend enough time trying to understand Heidegger, it will drive you mad, which was evidently his intention. At least, to drive you out of the real world and into his world.
We have shaken down this very misunderstanding of the term "realism" on a previous thread. And it is an important one, because if the correspondent can get Plato off the table, he can fabricate his own "reality" to justify himself (at least in his own mind LOL!)
Thank you too for all the great reading suggestions - which I'm sure betty boop will also be interesting in reading.
You might be interested in knowing that she and I have just completed a book of our own addressing these very issues.