> > I'm puzzled on one count, though: I'm pretty sure > that the LP-ers--Carnap surely, and even > Neurath--would object to diamat on the basis that it > is metaphysics, thus cognitively meaningless.
They would say it was cognitively meaningless, and I didn't mean to say otherwise, I may have gotten tangled up in my syntax. But somethat that is CM is just not science, it's not therefore objectionable. Carnap says somewhere that poety is CM but has emotive content. ^^^^^ CB: However,it is not proven that diamat or materialist dialectics is cognitively meaningless, so....where does that leave the logical positivists ? Dialectical materialism is _a posteriori_, not _ a priori_ Engels' dialectics is the very opposite of metaphysics. "...so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it." Metaphysics is the claim that there _is_ an absolute truth ( and the metaphysician knows what that truth is). Engels dialectics ,after Hegel, dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth. ( See threads on this in Thaxis archives) Everything changes; nothing is eternal. There is no God. There is nothing but matter, and its mode of existence is motion. "But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect "state", are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute - the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
