杏吧原创

ROY BHASKAR is a philosopher out of sympathy with much recent philosophy. He thinks that it fastens on to the surfaces of things, rarely achieving depth, that it usually ends up by giving reasons for what we thought all along, and that, when it comes to the oldest and deepest of its problems, the ones that go back to Plato, it simply throws up its hands in defeat. So in Plato Etc he purports to solve some of the standard problems of philosophy. At the same time, Bhaskar mounts an extended attack on what he calls 鈥渋rrealism鈥� in various sectors of philosophy. He also attempts to revive and redeploy the 鈥渄ialectical鈥� and 鈥渃ritical鈥� methods usually associated with German philosophy from Hegel onwards.

Bhaskar鈥檚 own position is largely captured in a seven-part credo that begins chapter 8. First, 鈥渉umanity is not the centre of the cosmos鈥�. This means, roughly, that the 鈥渢ruth鈥� about a subject does not necessarily consist of what human methods of investigation or human evidence disclose. In the same vein, conclusions about how things are experienced do not necessarily determine the nature of those things. Secondly, 鈥渢here are non-actual realities鈥�: reality contains possibilities and necessities in addition to actualities. Thirdly, 鈥渘on-beings exist鈥�: what is absent or unacknowledged, for example, the past, the presupposed, or the suppressed, can exist and be causally efficacious in either an impersonal process or a personal activity. Fourthly, 鈥渆ntities permeate one another鈥�: things and processes may be interrelated in such a way that one is a necessary condition for the existence of the other. Totalities and their parts may be mutually involved in a deep metaphysical sense.

His fifth axiom, he says that 鈥渋ntentional causality occurs鈥�: there is such a thing as agency. The sixth asserts that 鈥渧alues can be derived from facts鈥�: a knowledge of natural necessities, power relations and so on, can show one that one ought (including morally ought) to act in certain ways. And, finally, 鈥渢he good society is implicit in elemental desire鈥�: there is an intelligible but complicated transformation of unreflective, possibly selfish, human desire into a demand for a democratic, ecologically conscious form of politics.

These seven points convey in a simplified form Bhaskar鈥檚 positive doctrine. They also illustrate his use of concepts such as absence and totality, which are also brought into his classification and 鈥渟olution鈥� of a wide range of philosophical problems. Among many others, Bhaskar discusses the problem of induction, a range of 鈥減roblems of agency鈥�, the relation of the natural to the social sciences, the problem of whether evaluations can be deduced from facts, as well as a host of difficulties internal to Kant鈥檚 critical philosophy, to Hegel鈥檚 reaction against Kant, and to Marx鈥檚 reactions against Hegel.

Many of his 鈥渟olutions鈥� to the problems he outlines are perfunctory at best and dependent on a baffling and largely idiosyncratic battery of technical terms and distinctions. There are polemical tours through the ancient, early modern and post Humean traditions on both sides of the Channel, and an appendix on 鈥淓xplaining Philosophies鈥�.

Plato Etc is the second of four volumes, the successor to Dialectic. Bhaskar claims in the preface that these two books together attempt no less a task than that 鈥渙f reversing 2500 years of philosophical thought, in which negativity (absence and change), ontology, structure, diversity and agency come to the fore鈥�. This is a staggeringly pretentious note on which to introduce a book, and it quite takes away the effect of his engagingly expressed dissatisfaction with recent philosophy.

Much of what he goes on to say is extremely obscure, but every so often one comes across a clear and highly inventive piece of observation or argument that keeps one on the author鈥檚 side. There were many scattered bits of the fourth chapter (on causality and emergence) that reawakened my sympathy for the book, but in between it was hard going. The chapter on dialectic contains many longueurs, and there are passages in the chapter on reference, truth and meaning that are fit only for Pseuds Corner. An example: 鈥淗ere we need to be ready with a non-valent response, identifying precisely our explicandum, as a propaedeutic perhaps to the Socratic response of 鈥榩roblematizing the question鈥� in a search for a fuller, deeper and/or more relevant set of descriptions of what appears as an inherently dilemmatic situation 鈥� to which the best response is to redescribe, or, in the practical domain, otherwise alter the alternatives.鈥�

The blurb on the back flap says that this is Bhaskar鈥檚 most accessible book, and unwary readers may think it is suitable as an introduction to philosophy. They would be wrong.