ABSTRACT
The first part of this chapter elaborates the philosophical and spiritual trajectory of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, dialectical critical realism and metaReality. 2 Bhaskar began his career as a philosopher of science in the 1970s, advocating a realist view as opposed to positivism and non-realism more generally. Since then, his philosophical journey has extended to broader concerns, passing through three main stages, from critical realism (CR) – transcendental or scientific realism, critical naturalism and the theory of explanatory critique – via dialectical critical realism (DCR) (and transcendental dialectical critical realism [TDCR]) 3 to (the philosophy of) metaReality. 4 These developments correspond to his metaRealistic insight of ‘dualism’, ‘duality’ and ‘identity’ (‘non-duality’), which appears in his latest book, The Philosophy of MetaReality. 5 My purpose is to show that the intellectually integrating transformation of Bhaskar’s philosophy, which takes a dialectical and a spiritual (or transcendental) turn from critical realism, corresponds to his metaRealistic foundation of ‘dualism, duality and identity’, and suggest that non-anthropic understanding of reality plays the key mediating role in this transformation. I trace the non-anthropic background of each stage – critical realism, dialectical critical realism and metaReality – by showing what the main concepts of each stage are and how he justifies them on the basis of the non-anthropic spirituality of dualism, duality and non-duality evolved in his latest stage of metaReality.
