"Introduction: Third Reality – On the Persistence of Philip K. Dick" is a scholarly essay by Alexander Dunst, likely serving as the introduction to an edited academic volume on Dick. The essay references a letter dated October 6, 1972, in which Dick reflects on life in Southern California and the merits of science fiction to arrive at a diagnosis of the historical present.
Dunst engages with Dick's observation about the plastic, trembling quality of the koinos kosmos (the shared, common world in Greek philosophy, as opposed to the idios kosmos or private world), which Dick found both revelatory and frightening. This philosophical framework, drawn from pre-Socratic Greek thought, was central to Dick's understanding of reality as unstable and potentially illusory.
The essay's title, "Third Reality," suggests Dunst explores a concept beyond Dick's binary of shared and private worlds, proposing a third category that may encompass the mediated, technological, or constructed realities that Dick's fiction so presciently examined. The piece represents contemporary academic Dick scholarship engaging with his philosophical legacy and its continuing relevance.