Description

Abstract

This is the ninth and last chapter of the first volume of the series, Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian to Quantum Imaginations, subtitled Unriddling the Quantum Enigma, by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi. In this chapter titled “The Creative Dialectics of Reality: Ontology, Epistemology, and Methodology,” Tamdgidi critically revisits Karl Marx’s unfulfilled promise of a clear presentation of the dialectical method, by providing an alternative interpretation that is stripped of its dualistic, materialist versus idealist, renderings. 

Outlining a creative dialectical method—one that is neither idealist nor materialist, but seeks to unify the truths of both in terms of a creative humanism—Tamdgidi applies the dialectical method to its own interpretation through a process of progressive splitting of research as a part of the creative human labor process as a whole in order to understand the creative dialectical logic constituting their essence. The definitions and categories of dialectical ontology, epistemology, and methodology are thereby systematically revisited and reconstructed in terms of a nonreductive, mutually creative dialectics of part and whole. This is followed by an effort at further concretizing the dialectical method as the essence of the research process and the creative human labor of which it is a part, which is in turn followed by a broad outline of the dialectical nature of the historical development of “dialectics.” 

The need in this chapter for revisiting the author’s methodological appendix previously deposited (2002) and published (2007) arises, first, from the author’s self-reflective need to bring the formulations of that method up to date in critical light of the findings of the present volume in terms of a need for moving from Newtonian toward quantum imaginations of reality. In particular, the relativistic interpretation of the quantum enigma as he has developed and offered in this volume requires that he revisits his earlier framework to see the extent to which that method accords with, or needs to be updated, in favor of a method for advancing the sociological imagination that is more in line with relativity and quantum science findings. 

A second important reason for this retrospective rereading of the author’s text on the creative dialectical method is that he has also implicitly applied the same method throughout the present volume as well. So, by revisiting that text, he provides an opportunity for himself and the interested reader to consider the methodological backbone or guiding thread, so to speak, of the present study in more explicit light. In other words, this chapter basically makes visible the methodological structure of how the present study on the quantum enigma was itself conducted following the basic guiding thread of the “creative dialectical method” he had formulated before, one that was developed in an applied setting in his doctoral research (and subsequent writings) and has also been used and applied in this volume. 

Recommended Citation

Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2020. “CHAPTER 9 — The Creative Dialectics of Reality: Ontology, Epistemology, and Methodology.” Pp. 555-648 in Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations: Volume 1: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma. (Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. XIII, Issue 1, 2020.) Belmont, MA: Okcir Press (an imprint of Ahead Publishing House).

The various editions of the volume of which this chapter is a part can be ordered from the Okcir Store and all major online bookstores worldwide (such as Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and others).