At 10:28 AM 3/9/2005 -0800, andie nachgeborenen wrote:

--- Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I can't speak to THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST, as I
> haven't read it, though it
> is gathering dust somewhere.  The Dialectics of
> Biology group produced a
> couple of interesting books, mostly without mumbo
> jumbo, as I recall.  I
> assume you meant 100% not 10% external.

Lewontin, Kamin, and Rose are all first rate scholars,
and the book is quite good in its substantive parts.
But the so-called dialectics is some sort of ritual
chant, and the history is potted and not altogether
accurate.

>
> As for dialectics and emergence, I think there is an
> essential distinction
> to be made between emergent materialism and
> idealist/vitalist
> notions.

Vitalism of any sort has been dead dead dead since the
mid-late 19th century.  Certainly no serious biologist
has maintained any such notion in this century.
Everyone agrees that there are no special vital
properties that explain why organisms are alive.  The
dispute has been between crude reductionism and
variants of sophisticated reductionism and emergent
antireductionism.  It is very hard to tell these
positions apart when they are suitably qualified.

Well, there was Driesch in the '20s, but I suppose that wasn't serious. But some of this stuff--biosemiotics--is highly suspect, and I'm suspicious of process philosophy as well.


Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If
dialectics can help, I'm in favor of it, though i have
not seen any evidence that dialectics itself is more
than an emergent property of a certain sort of
usefully holistic thinking.  I mean, it's a real
enough phenomenon. Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci are
crealy dialectical thinkers.  But I don't think they
came to their subject matters with an antecedent
dialectical method they could apply to those subject
matters. They thought about things in a manner that
was dialectical. Better to try to follow their example
in their concrete analyses than to extract a method
from their procedures.

Yes, I agree. I was trying to get at the same thing. And of course for Marx, Lukacs, and Gramsci, dialectics of natural processes was irrelevant.


Fair enough. But analytical philosophers certainly
developed versions, e.g. Moore's theory of
supervenient properties -- the good being (he thought)
a non-natural property that supervened on natural
ones, such that two actions/people could not be alike
in all natural properties but differ in whether they
were good or not.

>
> Soviet tampering with the various sciences and
> disciplines is not news. . . .  Perhaps though
> another thing to look at is
> the dominant schools of bourgeois philosophy in the
> teens and '20s--what
> was the competition doing

Well, there is what it looks like now and what it
looked like then. And what it to liked to them as
opposed to what it looked like, e.g., to Russell or
Dewey or even to Gramsci or Lukacs or Weber.


I'm not sure what you mean, but of course there's a different perspective at that moment and retrospectively. Perhaps the historical research being done now will help. I think for example of THE PARTING OF THE WAYS, which is about Canrap, Heidegger, and Cassirer.

Where sympathetic critics
> try to refine the
> concepts, they are constantly beaten back by
> intellectual ineptitude and
> dogmatism, whether it is Bernal against Macmurray,
> Novack against Van
> Heijenoort, Sayers against Norman .... The record is
> dismal.

I don't know MacMurray, but the other examples are
like the Jones Junior High vs. the Green bay Packers,
just in terms of sheer candlepower. Bernal was no
second-rater, though, at least in hsi biology and
history.


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