The phases of Roy Bhaskar's work
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Bhaskar's work, listed according to its main subject matter, is presented below roughly in chronological order (this is a general guide as Bhaskar 's work builds upon itself and certain themes are common to all his phases):
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Phase 1: Transcendental realism - Considers the ontology and epistemology of the natural sciences, reversing philosopical errors that date back at least to the Ancient Greeks. See Bhaskar's "A Realist Theory of Science" (1975) and his posthumously published PhD Thesis "Empiricism and the Metatheory of the Social Sciences" (written around 1971, finally published in 2018, which contains aspects of much of Bhaskar's subsequent writing)
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Phase 2: Critical naturalism - Considers the ontology and methodology of the social sciences, providing the argument that social science can be understood metatheoretically in the same way as natural science, even though the methods used in the two approaches must be different. Introduces Bhaskar's break-through concept of the Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA). See Bhaskar's "The Possibility of Naturalism" (1979).
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Phase 3: Dialectic - Considers how science relates to emancipation and ethics through a re-evaluation of Hegel's and Marx's dialectics. This re-evaluation defines change as 'absenting' by supplying absence with an ontology, so that there can be real absences. It also, amongst other things, shows how we can develop our human values through our factual discoveries, thus making a philosophical argument for an ethics that is neither relativist nor dependent on consensualism or revelation. See for instance Bhaskar's "Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation" (1987),"Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom" (1993) and "Plato, etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution" (1994).
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Phase 4: MetaReality - Considers the basis of 'the good' from the perspective of the realm of non-duality. "From the exciting perspective of metaReality, our heteronomous pursuits and oppressions are actually underpinned by, and depend totally upon our ground-state capacities, such as creativity and love, and states or moments of transcendence or non-duality; capacities and states which indeed have been largely unrecognised by mainstream social science." (Bhaskar, Enlightened Common Sense, 2016, p. 72) See also Bhaskar's various books on Metareality, published between 2000 and 2002, such as "The Philosophy of Meta-Reality: Creativity, Love and Freedom" (2002).
Phase 5: Interdisciplinarity - Considers the kind of scientific epistemology required to achieve 'the good', given that reality is layered and thus complex. See for instance Bhaskar et al's (Eds) "Interdisciplinarity and climate change: transforming knowledge and practice for our global future" (2010) and Bhaskar et al's "Interdisciplinarity and Wellbeing: A Critical Realist General Theory of Interdisciplinarity" (2017).
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Click on a Phase above to obtain more information about it. Bhaskar's book Enlightened Common Sense (2016) is a comprehensive overview of all these different phases. Each phase of critical realism is relevant to the question of emancipation. However, the later Bhaskar suggests that - whilst his earlier arguments about what is real (ontology) are an important philosophical precondition for emancipation - nevertheless, the actual practice of emancipation in the world requires ways of finding knowledge about what is real (epistemology). These ways of finding knowledge are likely to involve interdisciplinarity to cope with the layered complexity of reality. He therefore felt that it was important to develop a general theory of interdisciplinarity, which thus completed the journey he began when he realised that, given the philosophy of the time, his PhD research on the causes of world poverty was impossible. Bhaskar went so far as to say that applied critical realism - i.e., critical realist research aimed at addressing real-life issues, such as he planned to carry out in his PhD - is identical to interdisciplinarity.