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)

ABSTRACT Critical realist thought has theorised convincingly that epistemic relativism is constellationally embedded in ontological realism which in turn necessitates judgemental rationality. In social science, judgemental rationality involves acting upon plausible decisions about competing points of view. However, the tools for doing this are, as yet, under-articulated. This paper addresses this absence by articulating triangulation and depth-reflexivity as two tools for doing judgemental rationality in empirical research. It draws on the experiences of a diverse team working on an international comparative (...) research project on conversion to Islam in prisons. It demonstrates how epistemic and relational gaps between researchers and research subjects can be bridged by mobilising the ‘laminated’ properties and personal attributes of a diverse research team that factors in attributes that are absent as well as those present. The biographical experiences of the team are analyzed in a variety of intersecting dimensions: faith, ethnicity/ethno-culture, gender, class and professionality. (shrink)

In this philosophical memoir I trace out the part that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science played in the development of a non-reductive account of realism in art and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, and the part his Dialectic played in the theorization of the concept of the philistine developed by myself and Dave Beech between 1996 and 1998. Our de-positivization of the concept as a symptomatic negation of the bourgeois ‘aesthete’ drew extensively on Bhaskar's notion (...) of absence as a real absence. This in turn, allowed us to bring Bhaskar's realism and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into alignment, where the philistine plays a similar, if undeveloped and untheorized role. Overall, the article marks a recognition of the continuing possibilities of Dialectic for a theory of negation in contemporary art and cultural theory. (shrink)

Volume 18, Issue 3, June 2019, Page 221-238.

Ultimately all change in the social world depends on self-expansion leading to self-transcendence, that is, depends upon, even if it does not entirely consist in, radical negation, which is pivotal...

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...

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...

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)

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)

This article is a reflection on the significance of the recent struggle in Brisbane to prevent a two-year-old refugee child, Asha, from being taken from hospital and deported. The child was suffering from burns and after her treatment the doctors refused to sign a release form as her safety could not be guaranteed in the refugee camp. The stance of the doctors produced widespread support from the people of Brisbane and the rest of Australia forcing the government to temporarily back (...) down and allow the child and her parents to be placed in community detention in Australia rather than off-shore. (shrink)

In this article we endeavour to address the problem of the low levels of Indigenous school attendance in Australia through strategies based on dialectical critical realism and metaRealism. We employ the concepts of the dialectic of the 7 Es, the concrete universal, four-planar social being, the self, active perception and dialectical universality to show how Indigenous education and an approach to school attendance can be developed that leads to a transformation of the underlying relations between educators and Indigenous communities, families (...) and children. In specific terms we endeavour to show how school connectedness can be given an emancipatory orientation. (shrink)

This essay calls attention to robust synergies between Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of dialectical critical realism and Terrence W. Deacon’s recent investigation of the geo-historical emergence of ententional or teleological phenomena, as well as important differences. Deacon has independently arrived at an understanding of absence as causally efficacious in the emergence of life and consciousness, and deploys a range of other concepts that resonate with DCR. He develops a critique both of eliminativist and monovalent approaches to ententionality, on the one hand, (...) and their panpsychist foil, on the other, and elaborates a polyvalent scientific alternative – the theory of emergent dynamics. Though this theory is not without problems, as its immanent critique reveals – and indeed in part because of these – it opens up the prospect of a mutually illuminating dialogue between DCR and metaRealism, on the one hand, and the life sciences, on the other, in which DCR/mr underlabours for these sciences, which in turn feed back into DCR/mr philosophy and social theory, thereby helping to actualize the possibility of non-positivist naturalism. (shrink)

It has long been taboo for feminist theorists to draw on notions of nature in their conceptualizations of gender relations. Objecting to this nature-phobia, I argue that we need to anchor our social theories in explicit notions of the natural necessities on which any social structure draws and must ultimately accommodate. Such a reference to a ‘natural ontological order’ is needed not only for explaining how power structures can get a hold over people, but also for specifying the ways in (...) which the natural necessities impose absolute constraints on the forms that oppressive structures can take, ultimately creating a conatus to getting rid of the oppressive structure. In the human-social realm a crucial aspect of nature is those basic human needs that any society must meet in order to reproduce itself. One such human need that has been theoretically overlooked, although often implicitly assumed, is the need for love. Drawing on Anna G. Jónasdóttir's theory of ‘love power’, I elaborate on the contradictions inherent in the power that men acquire by exploiting women's love, arguing that these contradictions can be understood only with reference to natural necessities. (shrink)