What does it entail to study the climate crisis from – or consistently with – a critical realist perspective? The paper addresses this question in three steps. First, it considers the boundaries of critical realism in relation to climate crisis research. In this context it identifies climate science as a field that in important respects resonates implicitly with critical realism. Conversely, a book by human ecologist Andreas Malm is introduced as an example of a work that, while sympathetic to critical (...) realism, in key respects contradicts core features of it. Second, to illustrate what an analysis of the crisis informed by critical realism can look like, the paper brings into focus the main causes of the climate crisis – including the capitalist growth imperative, neoliberalism, and consumer culture. Finally, the status quo project, the green growth project and the degrowth project are identified as fundamentally different ways of approaching the climate crisis. (shrink)

Let me begin by repeating two well-known features of critical realism. First, the core objective of the human species – it’s moral truth, is a sustainable, diversified global society in which the f...

ABSTRACTLove is the basis for a moral psychology of forgiveness. I argue for an account of love based on Roy Bhaskar's conception of its five circles, and of the ethical nature of human beings as concrete universals/singulars. Linking this to work of ‘The Forgiveness Project’, I argue that forgiveness can be understood metaphysically in terms of its relation to love of self, of the other, of the relation of self and other, of self, other and the wider community, and of (...) self and other in their ontological depth as unique individuals. Forgiveness involves both a ‘giving to’ and a ‘giving up’, and this can lead to a profound sense of identity between a victim and a perpetrator. Forgiveness is different for each person; it may draw upon a public/legal setting as a proxy for universal judgement; and it confronts social-structural and political elements which may block its development. (shrink)

The focus of this essay is on how we overcome the past by dealing with it. In this setting, the analysis is of the relationship between ‘moral transactions’ concerning blame, guilt, responsibility, apology and forgiveness and the possibility of transition away from states of trauma. The first section draws on previous work to set out a position on human love as the basis for an understanding of guilt and the ‘moral grammar’ of justice. The second section considers Martha Nussbaum’s claim (...) in Anger and Forgiveness that the idea of transition should be prioritized at the cost of a moral transactional analysis that would engage the moral grammar of blame, guilt, responsibility, apology and forgiveness. The latter is seen as potentially obstructing the transition to a better world. I suggest to the contrary there are grounds for thinking that a successful transition requires relevant moral transactions. (shrink)

Christian Smith’s To Flourish or Destruct is a thorough, sustained, and impassioned argument for what the author calls ‘critical realist personalism’. This is an ontologically based theory of the p...

This essay is a response to the recent exchange between Paul Marshall and Timothy Rutzou on critical realism and integral theory in Journal of Critical Realism 11, in which integral theory was designated by Rutzou ‘a poisoned chalice’ for critical realism. It argues that, while integral theory could benefit greatly from the adoption of critical realist ontology, metacritique and the structural analysis of politics, critical realism could benefit even more from the scientific syntheses achieved by integral theory, especially developmental psychology, (...) cultural anthropology and transpersonal psychology. (shrink)

This paper suggests philosophical foundations for mixed methods research based on the philosophy of critical realism. In particular, it suggests that the critical realist idea of the primacy of ontology helps bridge the apparent paradigmatic gap between qualitative and quantitative research. It illustrates this foundational idea by showing why and how a multi-disciplinary team used a mixed methods approach to understand the significance of religion in prison through a multi-site study of religious conversion to Islam in prison and how this (...) gives a better account than a single method approach. The mixed method research design used in the project sets out a new way of mapping and understanding religious conversion and differences within a faith group that draws on the emancipatory potential of critical realist thought. (shrink)

This essay considers the two-way relation between critical realism and psychoanalysis. Critical realism vindicates and deepens our understanding of ontology by drawing on the sciences for which it...

This article concerns the problems of guilt that emerge in connection with genocide discussed after the Second World War by Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Jean Améry and Primo Levi. It looks at the different forms of guilt: of perpetrators, bystanders, victims who became perpetrators, and of collective guilt. It argues that a way to understand the structure of guilt is to consider the idea of survivor guilt, and its link to an underlying metaphysics of guilt. It considers primarily Levi's account (...) of survivor and accomplice guilt, and the ‘grey zone’ where judgements become problematic. The aim is to consider the ethical structure that supports our understanding of specific guilt categories, and this is linked to Roy Bhaskar's account of metaReality and the sense of a unity or identity that operates at a deeper level than the difference, conflict and change that the other levels of his thought seek to understand. (shrink)