ABSTRACT
Critical realist philosophy has typically developed through a double metacritique1, in which some significant absence is noted in mainstream philosophy, or more especially in the philosophical discourse of modernity, an absence which also reflects an incompleteness in the development of critical realism up to that time, so that new developments function to metacritique its earlier phases. Thus, the big absence identified at the beginning of critical realism (1M) was the absence of ontology, and then the absence of ontological stratification (or a stratified ontology). With the development of dialectical critical realism (2E) the massive absence of absence itself was identified as a crucial scotoma or blind spot. The successive levels of the MELDARZ/A schema brought out the absences of internal relationality (3L), intentional causality and transformative praxis (4D), spirituality and inwardness generally (5A), enchantment (6R) and non-duality (7Z/A). Critical realism has thus itself developed dialectically, by the identification and rectification of absences in philosophical orthodoxy and in its own previous phases. Later in this chapter I will briefly recapitulate some of the highlights of its development in general, but first I want to look specifically at how critical realism can contribute to our understanding of the ontology of a good or eudaimonistic society, oriented to the flourishing of each as a condition of the flourishing of all.
