45 Facts About Roy Bhaskar

Ram Roy Bhaskar was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roy Bhaskar's DPhil changed course and was written at Nuffield College, Oxford, where Rom Harre became his supervisor, on the philosophy of social science and then the philosophy of science.

Roy Bhaskar's 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.

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

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

Roy Bhaskar was a founding member of the Centre for Critical Realism, International Association for Critical Realism and the International Centre for Critical Realism, the latter at the Institute of Education.

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

Roy Bhaskar's 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.

Roy Bhaskar 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.

Roy Bhaskar abandoned further work on dialectical critical realism after he experienced transcendental meditation.

Roy Bhaskar 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.

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

Roy Bhaskar said that he reintroduced ontology into the philosophy of science when that was almost heresy.

Roy Bhaskar argued for an ontology of stratified emergence and differentiated structure, which supported the ontological reality of causal powers independent of their empirical effects.

Roy Bhaskar developed it fully in Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, which developed the critical tradition of ideology critique within a CR framework by arguing that certain kinds of explanatory accounts could lead directly to evaluations and so science could function normatively, not just descriptively, as positivism has assumed since Hume's law.

Roy Bhaskar refers to the elimination of the intransitive objects of knowledge and thus the reduction of ontology to epistemology as the epistemic fallacy, which Roy Bhaskar asserts has been made repeatedly over the last 300 years of philosophy of science.

Roy Bhaskar focuses on the empiricist argument that science produces true knowledge of invariant causal laws by observing causal regularities: "a constant conjunction of events perceived".

Roy Bhaskar develops what he calls an immanent critique of empiricism in which he takes some of its core assumptions as correct for the purpose of the argument and then shows that to lead to an incoherence in the empiricist argument.

Roy Bhaskar argues that experimental science is necessary only when and because "the pattern of events forthcoming under experimental conditions would not be forthcoming without it".

Any causal regularity observed is then in part the product of their activity, which is necessary only because the causal regularities do not occur consistently in the outside world, which Roy Bhaskar calls open systems.

On that basis, Roy Bhaskar argues that the world can be divided into nested domains of the real, the actual and the empirical.

Critical naturalism is the term that Roy Bhaskar used to describe the argument that he develops in his second book The Possibility of Naturalism.

Roy Bhaskar defines naturalism as the view that "social objects can be studied in essentially the same way as natural ones, that is, 'scientifically'".

On one hand, Roy Bhaskar argues for naturalism in the sense that the transcendental realist model of science is equally applicable to both the physical and the human worlds.

Roy Bhaskar rejects the methodological individualist doctrine that social events can be explained purely in terms of facts about individual persons, but accepts that society has no other material presence than persons and the products of their actions.

Roy Bhaskar initially saw the work of Anthony Giddens on duality of structure as consistent with the TMSA, but he later accepted the critique of Giddens by Margaret Archer, who argued that Giddens conflated structure and agency.

Roy Bhaskar sees social structures as having emergent properties on the same model as structures in the natural world.

The importance of that argument, Roy Bhaskar suggests, is that it underpins the critical potential of the human sciences since they can provide a basis for political action by revealing the falsity of beliefs and their sources.

Roy Bhaskar later extends the argument from that cognitive form of explanatory critique, which argues that the sources of false knowledge should be removed, to a needs-based form, which applies a similar argument to sources of failures to meet human needs.

Roy Bhaskar attempted to incorporate critical rational human agency into the dialectic figure with his 'Fourth Dimension' of dialectic, which would ground a systematic model for rational emancipatory transformative practice.

In 2000, Roy Bhaskar published From East to West: The Odyssey of a Soul in which he first expressed ideas related to spiritual values that came to be seen as the beginning of his so-called 'spiritual' turn, which led to the final phase of critical realism, dubbed 'Transcendental Dialectical Critical Realism'.

Roy Bhaskar thought of it as "underlabouring" for the work done in the human sciences in pursuit of "the project of human self-emancipation".

Roy Bhaskar is sometimes described as a Marxist thinker, but his relationship to Marxism was ambivalent.

Roy Bhaskar clearly admired Marx as a philosopher of emancipation and both drew on and built on aspects of that work, at least up to and including the period of dialectical critical realism.

However, during the same debate with Callinicos, Roy Bhaskar referred to "The Marxists", as if the term did not include himself, and criticised them for neglecting the role of women in domestic labour.

Roy Bhaskar's work relates to politics primarily at a philosophical level.

Roy Bhaskar rarely involved himself with questions of practical politics, with the exception of his late collaborative work on climate change.

Roy Bhaskar repeatedly clarified that "transcendental realism is fallible, as corrigible as the outcome of any other piece of human argument".

Roy Bhaskar won the Bad Writing Contest in 1996, for a passage taken from Plato etc.