Roy Bhaskar

Ram Roy Bhaskar (15 May 1944 – 19 November 2014) was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism (CR).

Bhaskar argued that the task of science is "the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of the world", rather than the discovery of quantitative laws, and that experimental science makes sense only if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it.

He went on to apply that realism about mechanisms and causal powers to the philosophy of social science, and he also elaborated a series of arguments to support the critical role of philosophy and the human sciences.

According to Bhaskar, it is possible and desirable for the study of society to be scientific.

Roy Bhaskar is certainly the most prominent advocate for "critical realism," but he did not initiate either the term or the concept.

Bhaskar was born on 15 May 1944 in Teddington, London, the first of two sons.

His Indian father and English mother were Theosophists.

Bhaskar said his childhood was unhappy, with his father having high expectations of him.

In 1963, Bhaskar attended Balliol College, Oxford, on a scholarship to read philosophy, politics and economics.

The scholarship freed him from his father's influence over his chosen academic path.

Having graduated with first-class honours in 1966, he began work on a PhD thesis about the relevance of economic theory for under-developed countries.

His DPhil changed course and was written at Nuffield College, Oxford, where Rom Harré became his supervisor, on the philosophy of social science and then the philosophy of science.

Blumer, H. (1969).

The methodological position of symbolic interactionism.

In H. Blumer, Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Bhaskar married Hilary Wainwright in 1971.

The couple remained close lifelong friends after their separation and never divorced.

The term was used earlier by Donald Campbell (1974/1988, p. 432), and the concept of combining ontological realism and epistemological constructivism goes back at least to Herbert Blumer (1969).

Campbell, D. T. (1974).

Evolutionary epistemology.

In P. A. Schlipp (Ed.), The philosophy of Karl Popper, pp. 413–463.

La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co.

He was a World Scholar at the Institute of Education, University College London.

His thesis was failed twice, which he believed to be partly for political reasons, but the second version was published largely unchanged in 1975 as his influential text, A Realist Theory of Science.

Bhaskar lectured at the University of Edinburgh from 1975 and later moved to the University of Sussex.

He held visiting positions in several Scandinavian universities - adjunct professor in philosophy at the Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Tromsø, Norway, and guest professor in philosophy and social science, Department of Caring Sciences, Örebro University, Sweden.

The philosophy began life as what Bhaskar called "transcendental realism" in A Realist Theory of Science (1975), which he extended into the social sciences as critical naturalism in The Possibility of Naturalism (1978).

From 2007, Bhaskar was employed at the Institute of Education, in London, where he was working on the application of CR to Peace Studies.

He was a founding member of the Centre for Critical Realism, International Association for Critical Realism and the International Centre for Critical Realism (2011), the latter at the Institute of Education.

He died in Leeds with his partner, Rebecca Long, by his side on 19 November 2014.

Bhaskar himself lists ten main influences on his early work, including philosophical work on the philosophy of science and language; the sociology of knowledge; Marx "and particularly his conception of praxis"; structuralist thinkers including Levi-Strauss, Chomsky and Althusser; the metacritical tradition of Hegel, Kant, and even Descartes; and perspectivalism in the hands of Nietzsche, Fanon, Gramsci and Gandhi.

His dialectical turn engaged more deeply with Hegel, and he called his work in that phase "a non-preservative sublation of Hegelian dialectic" since it draws heavily on Hegel's work but moves beyond and improves on it.

He also saw it as preserving and building on his own earlier work and on Marx's work and claimed that "Marx was a proto-dialectical critical realist" but that there remained residues of Hegelian thought in his work.

He abandoned further work on dialectical critical realism, however, after he experienced transcendental meditation.

He turned his attention to a variety of Eastern traditions of philosophy, which were the major influences on his later turn to the philosophy of metareality.

Bhaskar's consideration of the philosophies of science and social science resulted in the development of critical realism, a philosophical approach that defends the critical and emancipatory potential of rational (scientific and philosophical) enquiry against both positivist, broadly defined, and 'postmodern' challenges.

Its approach emphasises the importance of distinguishing between epistemological and ontological questions and the significance of objectivity properly understood for a critical project.

Its conception of philosophy and social science is socially situated but not socially determined; it maintains the possibility for objective critique to motivate social change, with the ultimate end being a promotion of human freedom.

The term "critical realism" was not initially used by Bhaskar.