A number of contemporary issues demand transdisciplinarity, a fusion between insights from different disciplines within some overarching framework. Yet too often in such cases the disciplines continue to talk past each other. This paper focuses on critical realism as a way of coordinating the disciplines. Critical realism provides a view of reality as stratified, with real causal mechanisms operating at the physical, biological, and social levels, and combining with each other to generate the world as experienced. This perspective is applied within a framework which has a long but now somewhat neglected history in social and political thought. As people interact with nature and transform it into the things they need, they finish up transforming their own natures.
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