On Mon, Dec 22, 2025 at 05:15 PM, Charles wrote: > > Doesn't help to drag in "the Kantian, Philipp Frank," as Lenin saw him. > (Lenin, CW 14, p. 165)
A couple of points. First, Frank was only about 24 or 25 years old when Lenin wrote Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Lenin was not familiar with Frank's mature work, since most of that work came out years, indeed, decades after Lenin's death. Second, Lenin’s characterization of Philipp Frank as a “Kantian” in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism reflects a polemical usage in which any refusal to ground science in a metaphysical doctrine of matter is assimilated to idealism. Frank explicitly rejected this identification. He denied that science rests on a priori forms of consciousness, treated scientific concepts as historically and empirically conditioned instruments rather than subjective categories, and dismissed the Kantian thing-in-itself as methodologically superfluous (Frank, Modern Science and Its Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949, 6, 38; Philosophy of Science , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1957, 15). Frank further argued that abstention from metaphysical assertions about “matter” does not entail Machist subjectivism or political idealism, since the objectivity of science is secured through its practical functioning within social and experimental activity, not through philosophical declarations ( Modern Science and Its Philosophy , 283). Unlike Mach or Bogdanov, Frank did not ground knowledge in immediate experience or “elements,” but insisted that scientific objectivity arises from publicly testable theories embedded in collective experimental practice, a position explicitly intended to block the slide from empiricism into subjectivism. On this point, Frank’s position converges with Marx’s insistence that materialism is demonstrated in practice and historical analysis rather than guaranteed by metaphysical orthodoxy. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39802): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39802 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116902646/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
