| Sumario: | This essay calls attention to robust synergies between Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of dialectical critical realism (DCR) and Terrence W. Deacon's recent investigation of the geo-historical emergence of ententional or teleological phenomena (Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Mailer; Norton 2012), as well as important differences. Deacon has independently arrived at an understanding of absence as causally efficacious in the emergence of life and consciousness, and deploys a range of other concepts that resonate with DCR. He develops a critique both of eliminativist and monovalent approaches to ententionality, on the one hand, and their panpsy-chist foil, on the other, and elaborates a polyvalent scientific alternative -- the theory of emergent dynamics. Though this theory is not without problems, as its immanent critique reveals -- and indeed in part because of these -- it opens up the prospect of a mutually illuminating dialogue between DCR and metaRealism (MR), on the one hand, and the life sciences, on the other, in which DCR/MR underlabours for these sciences, which in turn feed back into DCR/MR philosophy and social theory, thereby helping to actualize the possibility of non-posiu'vist naturalism.
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