Has any philosophy in history coherently disambiguated the state of being “real” from being “existent”? Such that it’s broadly applicable to thoughts?

Question

I suspect that things which simply exist are not bound by limits and are hence unlimited. According to economic thinking, real things are those which are scarce or limited by constraints of physical reality and progressive expiry. Looking for further conjectures that can disambiguate what’s real from what exists.

Answer 1

For an object to be "real" it must exist and be authentic. A "real" Picasso vs a fake: Two paintings that both "exist" but only one is "real".

Answer 2

Kant distinguished the real from the existent, as described by Heidegger in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Chapter One Kant's Thesis: Being Is Not A Real Predicate, page 34

The concept of reality and the real in Kant does not have the meaning most often intended nowadays when we speak of the reality of the external world or of epistemological realism. Reality is not equivalent to actuality, existence, or extantness. It is not identical with existence, although Kant indeed uses the concept "objective reality" identically with existence.

The Kantian meaning of the term "reality" is the one that is appropriate to the literal sense of the word. In one place Kant translates "reality" very fittingly by "thingness," "thing-determinateness." The real is what pertains to the res. When Kant talks about the omnitudo realitatis, the totality of all realities, he means not the whole of all beings actually extant but, just the reverse, the whole of all possible thing-determinations, the whole of all thing-contents or real-contents, essences, possible things. Accordingly, realitas is synonymous with Leibniz' term possibilitas, possibility. Realities are the what-contents of possible things in general without regard to whether or not they are actual, or "real" in our modern sense. The concept of reality is equivalent to the concept of the Platonic idea as that pertaining to a being which is understood when I ask: Ti esti, what is the being?

So in the Kantian sense we may consider a nutritious, red (both predicates) apple (idea/essence). It is a possible real(ity), not necessarily actual. (Incidentally, omnitudo realitatis "all possible things" and possible dangers are what we have to look out for and think of negotiating blind corners and explorations in our everyday worlds. It's not a fiction, so to speak.)

Kant holds that actuality is not a description that can attach to the idea of the apple, page 36:

Thus he speaks of the concept of a thing and puts in brackets "of a real," which does not mean of an actual. For reality means the affirmatively posited predicate having real content. Every predicate is at bottom a real predicate. Therefore Kant's thesis reads: Being is not a real predicate, that is, being in general is not a predicate of any thing at all.

Kant sees actuality emerging from the combination of mind and thing, page 92:

Kant wishes to avoid conceiving of actuality, existence, itself as a res; he does this by interpreting existence as relation to the cognitive faculty, hence treating perception as position.

So colourful green ideas are real (as possibilities), but if they are thought, they are actual colourful green ideas.