ABSTRACT
This chapter began life as an extended review of Roy Bhaskar’s recent book, From East to West (hereafter FETW; 2000). It has since become a more general analysis of the ethics he has argued for in his developing account of the relationship between realism and moral theory. Our instinctive reaction to FETW was that it did not reflect what we took to be the central strengths of his earlier work on dialectical critical realism, in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993; referred to hereafter as Dialectic) and Plato Etc. (1994). On the contrary, we saw FETW as renouncing some of those strengths. This, however, left us with a question: did FETW simply represent a break with the earlier work, or did it continue themes already present there that we had previously overlooked? On reflection, we decided that the latter was the case, and therefore to investigate how these themes had emerged and come to play a part in the Bhaskar œuvre. Eventually, this investigation took us to themes in his earlier pre-, or perhaps proto-, dialectical work, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (SRHE; 1986). This chapter is an account of this process of exploration.
