Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this particular work by Cornforth was
later incorporated into his SCIENCE AGAINST IDEALISM.
I'm still trying to process the fact that this person apparently trained in
some sophisticated philosophy could descend to writing the shit he wrote on
dialectical materialism. Perhaps, like the Soviet philosophers, he was
much better at criticizing bourgeois philosophy than coming up with a
positive credible version of diamat. Now that I think of it, I basically
got on with my own intuitive version of dialectical materialism without
accepting any of its standard presentations, which are all horrible,
sloppy, half-assed, splapdash efforts.
Let me remind you that the fellow I mentioned specifically needs that one
book in Cornforth's trilogy on diamat, THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. For some
reason, he has to use it for his students, Marx help them.
At 08:10 PM 8/16/2005 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
On Tue, 16 Aug 2005 16:59:06 -0400 "Charles Brown"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> _In Defense of Philosophy_ is Cornforth's polemic on positivism. I
> have a
> hardback copy.
George Reisch in his book on logical empiricism,
*How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science*
has a discussion of Cornforth's book. He notes that
Cornforth and other Communist philosophers had
enjoyed amicable relations with the logical positivists
in the 1930s. And back then, it certainly helped
that one of the leading logical positivists, Otto
Neurath, considered himself to be a Marxist.
Later on relations between the Communists
and the logical empiricists broke down and
according to Reisch, Cornforth in his book
started off by reiterating Lenin's criticisms of
the Machists, which Cornforth applied against
the logical empiricists. Thus, the logical empiricists
were charged with being subjective idealists,
with having an overly formalistic approach to
philosophy and the like. Yet even so, Cornforth
still spared Neurath from many of the criticisms
that he lodged against people like Philipp Frank,
Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach and Moritz
Schlick. Indeed, Cornforth went out of his way
to praise some of Neurath's work. Cornforth
was at one with Neurath in terms of being
very devoted to the unification of the sciences.
And Cornforth took many of the other logical
empiricists to task precisely for their having
abandoned the cause of the unity of science.
As Reisch points out one of the reasons
that Neurath's work lost its hold among
philosophers of science in the post-WW II
period was because of the perception
that it was "Communistic." It was seen
by his critics as offering a philosophical
basis for "totalitarianism" and was codemned
as such. In fact,
Neurath was no dialectical materialist
but his socialist and Marxist sympathies
were quite apparent and they were seen
as coloring his work. And that was more
than sufficient to condemn it to obscurity
in the post-WW II period when virulent
anticommunism was holding sway
in the academy.
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