In his most important book to date, Roy Bhaskar mounts a devastating attack on purely analytical modes of thinking, conceiving reality and understanding their rela-tions. Developing his own original transcendental and critical realist philosophy, the author shows the necessity of meshing dialectical categories with the ontology he has already devel-oped. He further shows how the critique of a purely positive must complement the critique of a purely actual notion of reality, isolating the definition of being in terms of knowledge as the characteristic flaw of traditional philosophy. Then, elaborating his transformational model of social activity, with its conception of social science as explanatory, and thence emancipatory, Bhaskar traces its important implications for social theory, history and geography. Dialectic argues that critical naturalism, dialectically enriched, provides the basis for a completely general metatheory and methodology for the human sciences.

Roy Bhaskar utilizes these results to clarify the relations between the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, providing a measured defense of the latter and a critique of both the ‘dialectical materialist’ and ‘Western Marxist’ traditions. He profiles a riveting account of the trajectory of Western philosophy from its pre-Socratic origins to its contemporary analytical, Marxist and post-modernist forms. In so doing, he shows how certain deep-rooted misconceptions about knowledge and the nature of human beings and society cast light on the contemporary crisis of socialism.

Roy Bhaskar is Research Fellow in Philosophy at Linacre College, Oxford and City University, London. He is the author of A Realist Theory of Science, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, Plato, Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution, and Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy.

 Publication
August 1992

300 pages

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 0 86091 583 6
£15 / US$49.95