Date: Wed, 1 Jan 1997 20:50:54 -0800 (PST)
Subject: BHA: WHITHER CRITICAL REALISM?


At first I was glad to see so many critical realists pissed off at
the postmodernist hegemony in the Restinking Marxism conference
and prepared to launch an ideological counterattack.  Since then I
have seen some debates over what is transitive and intransitive
and all kinds of plans to launch a critical realist force in
academia --journals, conferences, etc.  But now I find myself
perturbed at the content of such ambitions.

What do you think critical realism ought to accomplish?  Is there
some useful purpose to be served by promoting a school of thought?
What is there that is new and original that this school has to
offer?  What intellectual results has it produced?  I'm getting a
bit skeptical.

First of all, I have yet to see anything original about Bhaskar,
save perhaps in his treatment of dialectics, which I cannot judge
because it is incomprehensible.  As for his "critical realism",
>from what I can see it is materialism dressed up with new
terminology.  As an old fashioned materialist myself, I have no
problem with this, as I am glad to support materialist philosophy.
But what really is there new in Bhaskar?  From what I see, he has
rescued a time-honored philosophical approach from the oblivion
consigned to it by empiricism, relativism, and skepticism.
Otherwise, I see nothing in it I haven't been thinking since I was
15 years old.  Aside from providing a schema for the defense of
materialism against empiricism and skepticism, a worthy if limited
task, what does "critical realism" have to offer the world?

I think of the history of Soviet dialectical materialism, which
played a similar role.  Unlike other anti-Stalinists, I have never
had a problem with the Soviet defense of basic materialist
ontology, but other than keeping bourgeois philosophy honest, it
seldom produced new results or analyses.  This is an honorable if
limited intellectual function.

The critical realist have big ambitions, and I do hope they can
kick the postmodernists' asses, but I see no indication so far
that they have anything new to say nor any profound applications
of their framework to reality, so I ask, what is there that
critical realists have to offer beyond yet another academic
gimmick?


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---