Plato Etc: Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution (Classical Texts in Critical Realism

by Roy Bhaskar

In this concise text, Roy Bhaskar sets out to diagnose, explain and resolve the "problems of philosophy". Plato Etc. reviews all the main areas of the the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science; the philosophy of logic and language; the philosophies of space, time and causality; the philosophy of the social and life sciences and of dialectic; ethics, politics and aesthetics; and the history and sociology of philosophy. Among the issues discussed are the problems of induction and universals, the question of relativism, Heidegger’s "scandal of philosophy" (the search for a proof of the reality of the external world), the nature of moral truth and the conundrum of free will and determinism. The last two chapters consist of a synoptic account of the development of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to poststructuralism. Plato Etc. seeks to revindicate the philosophical project, and to demonstrate that the author’s "dialectical critical realism" has the categorical power to remedy the problem fields of philosophy. The book serves both as a critical introduction to philosophy and as an invaluable resource for the scholar.

Genres: Philosophy

304 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 1994

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

[anton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considered 'truly appalling style', the winner sentence of the Bad Writing Contest in 1996:

Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal of the unholy trinity of Parmendean/Platonic/Aristotlean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and it's close ally, the epistemic fallacy with it's ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.

[William Adams · Rating 2 out of 5]

The subtitle of the book is “The problems of philosophy and their resolution.” Bhaskar does raise many of the most important problems of philosophy, especially philosophy of science, including those of epistemology, causality, time, language, and realism. But he does not “resolve” them in any way—the hubris of imagining that anyone could is monumental.

Rather, Bhaskar simply asserts a set of opinions as foundational and proceeds to demonstrate how his construction of reality follows from them. That is no small feat, and the book is worth reading to see how it is accomplished, but the project should have been titled: “How my philosophical assumptions lead to a doctrine of realism.”

Bhaskar’s rakes through Plato and many pre-Socratics, dismissing some of the earliest propositions as blatantly false and others as correct. The implicit idea seems to be that by deriving his foundational propositions from the ancients they acquire truthiness. In fact, his axiomatic selections are arbitrary. Dismissing Parmenides as wrong and Plato’s Theory of Forms as erroneous, does not make them so. That just establishes his opinion.

For example, he defines the “Epistemic Fallacy” as the analysis of statements about being in terms of statements about knowledge of being. But that’s only a fallacy if you don’t agree with it. A fallacy is a proposition that depends on errors in reasoning or logic. Is it illogical that “being” (all that is), depends on knowing? No. Calling it a fallacy doesn’t make it illogical. It just means he doesn’t like the idea.

Bhaskar believes from the get-go that a world of things and events exists without respect to the human mind. Fair enough. But if that is true, how could he know it except through the faculties of the human mind? Well, maybe there is another way: he could also know it if he had the mind of God. But that’s the very definition of hubris.

I enjoyed the book though I filled the margins with penciled objections. But in the process I also became aware of my implicit assumptions that urgently need unpacking. While I remain unpersuaded of Bhaskar’s philosophy of “critical realism,” if you can slog through the language games, hubris, esoteric language, cryptic diagrams, and blizzard of philosophical references, it is a worthy read. Bhaskar beginners should not start here. More accessible books are available.

Bhaskar, Roy (1994). Plato Etc. New York: Verso/New Left, 267 pp.