In this Special Issue of Journal of Critical Realism on Normativity, Elder-Vass has provided a paper that in part responds to one that Chris Winship and I wrote together, which was presented at the...

ABSTRACTAs a comment on the debate between Dave Elder-Vass and Leigh Price, I propose a dialogue between Bhaskar and Habermas. If we could introduce critical realism into critical theory, we might...

This article provides a rationale for adopting the critical realism instead of pragmatism paradigm when researching skilled migrants' workplace integration in Australia. While the extant...

Rowland’s message in Morality by Design mirrors Kant’s ‘moral argument’ for God. As such, he is part of a global trend in philosophy towards a ‘religious renaissance’, also reflected in the work of orthodox critical realists, especially those who are drawn to (Kantian-inspired) Jurgen Habermas and/or (Pragmatist) John Dewey in addition to Roy Bhaskar. Many orthodox critical realists may not realize that their approach – which assumes the existence of an absolute, innate, embedded morality – ultimately requires the idea of (...) God to be consistent. By conflating faith with reason, this religious renaissance offers a progressive-sounding discourse that can be used to legitimise activism to achieve socially conservative, yet politically left wing, policy outcomes, norm formation and judicial interpretations. It therefore threatens the hard-won rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community. This review essay offers Bhaskar's original critical realism as an antidote to the religious renaissance in philosophy. (shrink)

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

Bhaskar's philosophy supports society via a process of homeostasis to resist socioecological system disintegration by developing its values and ethics in response to endogenous and exogenous change. To the contrary, positivist (first generation) and hermeneuticist (second generation) approaches to systems theory have distorted humanity's mechanism of homeostasis because, amongst other things, they disallow the use of facts to guide values/actions. Since acting on knowledge is, ceteris paribus, a given in Bhaskar's approach, resolving socioecological system problems involves correcting the method of (...) homeostasis (our method of finding knowledge and acting on it) rather than correcting the consequences of the failure of homeostasis (the poorly informed action or inaction). This is reminiscent of Gandhi's approach to social transformation in which we trust the means to arrive at appropriate ends and it releases activists from having to be keepers of the moral high-ground or having to try to change people's behaviour. (shrink)

This article illustrates the process of applied critical realist research using a case study of political decision-making in transport. Critical realism is often used to analyse socio-political cha...

In this wide-ranging interview, Dave Elder-Vass discusses his main contributions to critical realist theory over two decades. In the first half, he explains his early work on emergence, agency, str...