This Sorrowful Song: A Genealogy and Ethics of Critical Realism

This Sorrowful Song: A Genealogy and Ethics of Critical Realism, addresses the concept and practice of critical realism through a semiotic and ethical lens. In trying to understand how a concept or a set of concepts functions in the world, it is important to contextualise the way it functions within three networks or constellations of meaning: antecedent frameworks, coextensive frameworks and pragmatic frameworks. This book is constructed around these three frameworks, as any text about an idea - ethics - or a conceptual tradition - a critical realist genealogy - should be. It traces the genealogy of the term 'critical realism' through the work of Roy Sellars, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilfred Sellars, Richard Rorty, Roy Bhaskar and Robert Brandom. It sets out a theory of critical realism (its genealogical, semantic, ethical and pragmatic elements) that pays due deference to these six seminal theorists, contextualising this theory as a replacement and alternative to empiricism. There is a dearth of monographs and introductory texts about the most important relation in social theory and meta-philosophy, that of world-to-mind and mind-to-world relations and connections - the critical, ethical and transformational apperceptive process.