Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism

by Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig (Editor)

Since the 1970s, critical realism has grown to address a range of subjects, including economics, philosophy, science, and religion. It has become a complex and mature philosophy.Enlightened Common The Philosophy of Critical Realism looks back over this development in one concise and accessible volume. The late Roy Bhaskar was critical realism's philosophical originator and chief exponent. He draws on a lifetime's experience to give a definitive, systematic account of this increasingly influential, international and multidisciplinary approach.Critical realism's key element has always been its vindication and deepening of our understanding of ontology. Arguing that realist ontology is inexorable in knowledge and action, Bhaskar sees this as the key to a new enlightened common sense. From the definition of critical realism and its applicability in the social sciences, to explanation of dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality, this is the essential introduction for students of critical realism.

Genres: Philosophy

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 11, 2011

About the author

Roy Bhaskar (born May 15, 1944) is a British philosopher, best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of Critical Realism.

Bhaskar was born in Teddington, London, the elder of two brothers. His Indian father and English mother were Theosophists.[1]

In 1963 Bhaskar began attending Balliol College, Oxford on a scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Having graduated with first class honours in 1966, he began work on a Ph.D. thesis about the relevance of economic theory for under-developed countries. This research led him to the philosophy of social science and then the philosophy of science. In the course of this Rom Harré became his supervisor.

Reviews

[Keith Gillette]

This is the most poorly written book I have ever forced myself to read cover to cover. I have to disagree vehemently with the editor in his preface when he says "Enlightened Common Sense provides an accessible, lucid and coherent account of Bhaskar's system overall, achieving a high level of simplicity and clarity without sacrificing profundity. It will finally lay to rest at least one of the libels Bhaskar had to endure, that he was an abominable writer who cared not a jot for his readers."

Now perhaps if I had read any of Bhaskar's earlier works, I would not have found his terminology obscure, assertions unsupported, and definitions (some presented chapters after first use) cryptically terse. But if those prior works are the ones for which he gained reputation as an abominable writer, I fear I would still be making the same judgment.

Regardless, I made myself slog through this book, as I wanted to like it, given from what of it I was able to grasp (in no small part from exposure to outside interpreters of critical realism), I think it contains genuinely interesting and important ideas, most prominently, from my perspective:

Transfactuality: Differentiation of the domains of the real, actual, and empirical

Retroduction: as distinguished from deduction and induction (and closely related to if not overlapping with abduction), the imagining a mechanism that would generate the phenomenon to be explained.

The transformational model of social activity: Social structures as both enablement and constraint on human agency, which reproduce and transform social structures.

Existential intransitivity: “Being contains but is not reducible to knowledge”

The epistemic fallacy: the reduction of ontology to epistemology; “The Western philosophical tradition has mistakenly and anthropocentrically reduced to the question of what is to the question of what we can know.”