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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