In this episode of the Integration podcast, Leigh Price sits down with Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to go further into critical realism than her IAM Research Forum talk had room for. She traces Roy Bhaskar's philosophy through its major phases, from transcendental realism through dialectical critical realism, where his concept of absence resolves long-standing puzzles in the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic.
From there, she unpacks what's often called Bhaskar's "spiritual turn," the philosophy of metaReality: its account of non-duality and re-enchantment, and its debt to the African concept of Ubuntu. She also shares her own contribution to the field, an argument that critical realism functions as a form of systems theory, one it's rarely been credited for.
Price describes the historic dialogues between critical realists and integral theorists, where real synthesis emerged alongside real tension, and recalls working alongside Bhaskar directly, including an unfinished chapter on human flourishing he asked her to write shortly before he died.
The episode closes on critical realism's relevance to the metacrisis, including the case that most of us already reason like critical realists in practice, and what it would take to actually shift the root metaphors we use to make sense of the world.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:15 – The Phases of Critical Realism: From Transcendental Realism to Dialectics
00:03:52 – Discovering Absence: Bhaskar's Breakthrough Beyond Hegel and Marx
00:15:34 – Bhaskar, Marx, and Freud: Emancipation and the Roots of Dialectic
00:22:12 – The Philosophy of metaReality
00:32:05 – Critical Realism as Unrecognized Systems Theory
00:38:24 – Critical Realism Meets Integral Theory
00:52:48 – What's Missing: The Unwritten Chapter on Flourishing
01:02:33 – Critical Realism and the Metacrisis
01:07:29 – Closing Reflections and Gratitude
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