From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul (Critical Realism: Interventions)

Description

"In his most audacious and radical book to date, Roy Bhaskar develops his existing philosophy of dialectical critical realism into a philosophy of and for universal self-realisation, which he also terms a transcendental dialectical critical realism. A general theoretical introduction establishes the existence of God as the fundamental categorial structure of the world and unconditional love as the cement of the universe.". "This system of thought is followed by a narrative novella designed to render plausible the ideas of reincarnation, karma and moksha or liberation and to support an ethic of engaged but unattached activity in the world, ultimately oriented to universal self-realisation in the becoming of what From East to West argues we already essentially (but only partially, i.e. not only) are, namely free or enlightened. To realise this, Bhaskar argues, we have to shed both the illusion that we are not essentially free and Godlike, and the constraining determinations (constituting an objective world of illusion, duality and alienation) which that illusion grounds.". "A radical resynthesis of aspects of Western and Eastern thought, this book is also a major new development in critical realism. From East to West is bound to stimulate debate in ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of (comparative) religion."--BOOK JACKET.

First Sentence

The foremost claims of the transcendental realism essayed in A Realist Theory of Science are (1) to have established the irreducibility of ontology or the theory of being to epistemology or the theory of knowledge and a fortiori (and against the epistemic fallacy) that of being to knowledge, of being to our (i.e. human) knowledge of being; and (2) to have demonstrated some propositions in it, that is, to have given the re-vindicated subject of ontology a certain content or shape.

Subjects