Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice

by Norrie; Alan

• ISBN13: 9780415560368
• ISBN10: 0415560365
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2009-10-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Dialectic and Difference is the first systematic exploration of Roy Bhaskar's dialectical philosophy and its implications for ethics and justice. This text is essential reading for all serious students of social theory, philosophy, and legal theory.

Author Biography

Alan Norrie has recently taken up a Chair in Law at the University of Warwick. He was previously Drapers' Professor of Law at Queen Mary and Westfield College and Edmund Davies Professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at King's College London. He has a longstanding-interest in critical, realist philosophy and is President of the International Association for Critical Realism. His last book, Law and the Beautiful Soul, won the SLSA Hart Book-Prize for 2006.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Introduction: natural necessity, being and becoming	p. 1
Three aims and four elements	p. 1
Philosophical difficulty	p. 2
Original critical realism: the necessity of being	p. 7
Dialectical critical realism: being and becoming	p. 11
Reworking dialectic: totality, ethics and metacritique	p. 16
The grounds of justice	p. 19
Conclusion	p. 20
Accentuate the negative	p. 22
Absence: what's in a word?	p. 23
From product to process: critical realism's 'second edge'	p. 28
The primacy of absence	p. 34
Ontological monovalence and metacritique	p. 42
Conclusion	p. 47
Diffracting dialectic	p. 50
Hegel's dialectic	p. 51
Hegel's immanent critique: towards diffraction	p. 58
Materialist diffraction: contradictions	p. 65
Materialist diffraction in practice	p. 75
Conclusion	p. 81
Opening totality	p. 86
Totality and totalities	p. 88
Dialectical figures in totality	p. 96
Detotalisation: philosophy and its (historical) discontents	p. 105
Retotalisation: the concrete universal	p. 113
Conclusion	p. 118
Constellating ethics	p. 120
Ethical starting points	p. 121
Dialectical rationality: from 'primal scream' to eudaimoma	p. 132
Constellating ethics and world	p. 144
Conclusion	p. 156
Metacritique I: philosophy's 'primordial failing'	p. 158
Parmenides to Plato: absence as difference	p. 160
Plato to Aristotle: difference and universal	p. 169
Plato to Hume: the rationalist-empiricist vice	p. 178
Metacritique and poststructural philosophy	p. 182
Conclusion	p. 189
Metacritique 0: dialectic and difference	p. 192
Non-being and difference: Deleuze, Nietzsche and Heraclitus	p. 193
Non-being as real absence: Bhaskar and Heraclitus	p. 204
Conclusion	p. 211
Conclusion: natural necessity and the grounds of justice	p. 124
Natural necessity as 'material meshwork'	p. 215
Natural necessity as 'reality principle'': the real, ideal and actual	p. 220
Natural necessity, the universal and the particular	p. 224
Conclusion	p. 230
Notes	p. 232
References	p. 245
Index	p. 249
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