Roy Bhaskar

Bhaskar married Hilary Wainwright in 1971. The couple remained close lifelong friends after their separation and never divorced. He died in Leeds with his partner, Rebecca Long, by his side on 19 November 2014.

In 2000, 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'. That publication and the ones that followed it were highly controversial and led to something of a split among Bhaskar's proponents. Some respected Critical Realists cautiously supported Bhaskar's 'spiritual turn', but others took the view that the development had compromised the status of critical realism as a serious philosophical movement.

His early books were considered "models of clarity and rigour", but Bhaskar has been criticised for the "truly appalling style" (Alex Callinicos, 1994) in which his "dialectical" works were written. He won the Bad Writing Contest in 1996, for a passage taken from Plato etc. (1994).

The second phase of Critical Realism, the dialectic turn initiated in Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom (1993) and developed further in Plato, etc (1994), won some new adherents but drew criticism from some critical realists. It argued for the 'dialecticising' of CR, by an elaborate reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. Arguing against Hegel and with Marx that dialectical connections, relations and contradictions are themselves ontological (objectively real), Bhaskar developed a concept of real absence, which he claimed could provide a more robust foundation for the reality and the objectivity of values and criticism. He 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.

That explanatory project was linked with a critical project, the main idea of which is the doctrine of Explanatory Critique. Bhaskar developed it fully in Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (1987), 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. Such a move, it was hoped, would provide the Holy Grail of critical theory, an objective normative foundation.

One of the core themes of Bhaskar's work, which he returns to several times across its different phases, is that philosophical arguments can be provided to support sociopolitical critique. His first attempt to provide such support comes in the form of the concept of explanatory critique, which was first introduced in The Possibility of Naturalism but developed more fully in Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (1987). His argument is that if other things are equal, if something (S) is responsible for producing a false belief, one may proceed to a negative ethical evaluation of S and to a positive evaluation of action directed at its removal. It helps to explain the argument to think of it as related to Marxist ideology critique in which S is some sort of social structure, say capitalism, that produces false beliefs (ideology) but in which the basis of the critical response is not the harms caused by capitalism but that it misleads people about its true nature. The importance of that argument, 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.

Critical naturalism is the term that Bhaskar used to describe the argument that he develops in his second book The Possibility of Naturalism (1979). He 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, 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. On the other hand, however, he argues that studying the human world is studying something fundamentally different from the physical world and so the strategy to study it must be adapted. Critical naturalism, therefore, implies social scientific methods that seek to identify the mechanisms producing social events but with a recognition that they are in a much greater state of flux than events of the physical world (human structures change much more readily than those of, say, a leaf). In particular, it must be understood that human agency is made possible by social structures that themselves require the reproduction of certain actions/preconditions. Further, the individuals that inhabit the social structures are capable of consciously reflecting upon and changing the actions that produce them, a practice that is in part facilitated by social scientific research.

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. 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.

The term "critical realism" was not initially used by Bhaskar. 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). The term "critical realism" is an elision of transcendental realism and critical naturalism and was accepted by Bhaskar after it had been proposed by others.

'Transcendental realism' was the term used by Bhaskar to describe the argument that he developed in his first book, A Realist Theory of Science (1975). (Not to be confused with F. W. J. Schelling's transcendental realism, or Arthur Schopenhauer's transcendental realism.) The position is based on Bhaskar's transcendental arguments for certain ontological and epistemological positions based on what reality must be like for scientific knowledge to be possible.

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. 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.

Ram Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) 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.

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.