See the latest entry in my Emergence Blog for specific references alluded
to in my previous discussion of Cornforth:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/emergence-blog.html
I've alluded time and time again to the Norman-Sayers debate on
dialectics. I retrieved my review of 1995 and made it into a web page:
Dialectics Bout: Richard Norman vs. Sean Sayers
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/norman-sayers.html
In response to your questions . . .
if you'll note the intro to my emergence blog, you'll see reference to my
primary purpose:
"This blog tracks my ongoing information-gathering and commentary on the
philosophical, ideological, and social issues surrounding emergence, and
constitutes one segment of a larger project. I make no pretense of
contributing to the technical development of emergentist formulations. My
focus is on the historical reconstruction and the philosophical and
ideological role of emergentism in the social ecology of ideas."
So I guess you're right. I'm not contributing to the positive technical
elaboration of emergentism in or out of the scientific community, though in
fact in discussions involving practicing scientists there is from time to
time an informal conviction that some version of emergentism is necessary,
esp. with regards to the mind-body problem.
Now is scientific practice 'revolutionary practice'? Will 'revolutionary
practice' inform scientific practice? Well, one of the purposes of my blog,
if you'll check its archive, is to track the breakdown of rationality in
decaying bourgeois society, including the sciences and especially their
popularization, as they strain at the cutting edge of their theories and
problems--cosmology, evolutionary psychology (sociobiology), cognitive
science, artificial intelligence--and begin to disintegrate at the limits
of their world-conception. But no philosophy can dictate a positive way
forward; it can only exercise a critical and thematic function. As for the
relation between political revolution and a revolution in prevailing
scientific orientations, there is a diffuse, general relationship in that
felt dissatisfaction and need for alternatives may lead to rethinking of
assumptions and changes of direction, but the specific 'revolutionary
practice' in science must be intrinsically related to its own
development. The changes in orientation that are societally broad as well
as specifically cognitive must include a challenge to the vacillation
within bourgeois thought between positivism and mysticism.
At 10:04 AM 6/19/2006 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:
Ralph Dumain :
Furthermore, while Cornforth's class analysis of the history of philosophy
may be broadly correct (though it is micro-incorrect in failing to account
for the subjective self-understanding of positivists and pragmatists), his
reduction of the contrast between Marxism and bourgeois philosophy to "two
camps" is Stalinist through and through. Not only is he wrong about the
nature of the Stalinist camp, but he is wrong about the relationship of
Marxist to non-Marxist philosophies. In practice, he treats Marxist
philosophy as a system opposed to other systems, though he denies doing
so. Like most philosophers influenced by diamat--in this period,
especially--he was very good at exposing both the social roots and the
idealist blinders of bourgeois philosophy--i.e., at exercising the negative,
critical function of Marxist philosophy--but diamat as a constructive
philosophy remained primitive, underdeveloped, stagnant, locked into
formulas and authorities. This is the tragedy of the whole tradition.
Others have endlessly criticized the logical structure of diamat over the
past century. One could toss off hundreds of names. The first that pop
into my mind are Scanlan, Norman, and 'Rosa Lichtenstein'. There are some
who have argued that bad logic works to the advantage of bad
ideology--Popper, for example, and now 'Rosa'. However, there remains more
to be said about this, even at this late date. It is especially relevant
for recalibrating the relations among intellectual traditions, my larger
project.
^^^^^^^
CB: These all sound like exercises of a negative critical function as well.
Where is an affirmative critique or an exercise of synthesis in materialist
dialectics or whatever the proper name for Marxist dialectics is ?
The synthetic development of Marxist dialectics would come out of the
revolutionary practice, as in actual revolutions in the SU and progeny, no ?
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