Plato, Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution

This study sets out to diagnose, explain and resolve the “problems of philosophy.” It reviews all the main areas of the subject: the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science; the philosophy of logic and language; the philosophies of the space, time and causality; the philosophy of the social and life sciences and of dialectic; ethics, politics and aesthetics; and the history and sociology of philosophy. Among the issues discussed are the problems of induction and universals, the question of relativism, Heidegger‘s “scandal of philosophy” (the search for a proof of the reality of the external world), the nature of moral truth, and the conundrum of free will and determinism. The last two chapters consist of a synoptic account of the development of Western philosophy from the pre-socratics to poststructuralism. The book seeks to revindicate the idea of the philosophical project and to demonstrate that Bhaskar‘s “dialectical critical realism” has the categorial power to remedy the problem fields of philosophy. It serves both as an introduction to philosophy and as a useful resource for the scholar.

Roy Bhaskar is an independent scholar and founder of the critical realist movement in the social sciences. He is the author of several books, including The Possibility of Naturalism, Reclaiming Reality, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom and Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom.