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Cosmology and the relationship of cosmology to materialism are fascinating subjects. I would just like to add some elaboration on two points in the long posting on "How did the university begin?" Louis Proyect wrote: > On the In Defense of Marxism website, you can find a three part article > ( http://www.marxist.com/science-and-technology/ ) by Adam Booth on > "The Crisis in Cosmology". In part one Booth wants to make it clear that > Marxists have no truck with any theory that the Pope could embrace, > even mistakenly. The "big bang" and some related theories are just too > close for comfort as a kind of creation myth: Earlier this year Pete Brown commented on Adam Booth's views on cosmology in an article entitled "Marxism and Science". This is a brief excerpt from the introduction: "...Booth's series of articles on cosmology appeared on the IMT website beginning on November, 17, 2014. Entitled "The Crisis of Cosmology", this series is a broadside attack on present-day cosmology and an attempt to substitute Marxist-sounding rhetoric for science. This is a completely mistaken approach to how Marxists should approach science and scientific debates. "Marx and Engels were materialists who enthusiastically but critically accepted the core of the natural science of their day. They embraced the latest scientific achievements and promoted the advances made by Darwin and Morgan among others. Booth tries to put himself in the Marxist tradition by criticizing contemporary cosmology and doing so with the help of quotations from Engels. But in the process he puts himself at odds with the scientific attitude of Marx and Engels. If contemporary cosmology were a pseudo-science and its practitioners nothing but charlatans, Booth would have a point. It's all very well to criticize some wild speculation, but today's cosmologists have actually discovered new, important facts about the universe, facts ignored by Booth. " Subheads are: * [Booth's demagogy on] Creationists and Beginningists * Booth in the Dark * Ignoring Facts... * ...While Spouting "Infinity" The full text is at http://www.communistvoice.org/DWV-150221.html > The other two articles in Booth´s series mostly amount to arguing against > the wisdom of synthesizing quantum mechanics and Einstein´s theory of > relativity. Plus some quotes from Lenin´s polemic against > Empirio-Criticism, a work that is mostly of interest to the archivists > among us. The problem is Booth not Lenin. Lenin's "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" is an exceptionally good work, and it has an approach towards science that is diametrically opposed to that put forward by Booth. In this work, Lenin did not stand in the way of the new discoveries taking place in physics and nitpick at them , but instead saw them as part of the progress of materialism, and as showing the necessity of dialectical rather than mechanical materialism..Thus he backed Engels saying that each epoch-making discovery in science requires materialism "to change its form". That's materialist philosophy changing in order to adapt to scientific discoveries, not science being held back by dogmatic generalities. This goes against the Trotskyist Booth, who embraces the old form of materialism as tightly as he can; against the adventures of Stalinism in theoretical physics; and against the mechanical materialism that still has a lot of influence in various circles. -- Joseph Green _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
