Jim,

Thanks for that; however, while I recognise that others have said somewhat
similar things, I do not think you have shown that the ones you list argue
the way I do.

Hook does not pose this dilemma, as far as I am aware. If you give me the
page reference, I will check. If it is the same, as I said, I will be
gob-smacked.

I share with Cohen only an antipathy toward Hegel; his attempt to do
analytic Marxism I reject because it wasn't analytic enough (by a long way),
and scarcely Marxist. However, I greatly admired his attempt to bring
clarity to historical materialism. It's a pity his detractors failed to copy
his here, and quickly returned to the Hegelian mire.

I was aware of Neurath, but my take on this is not the same as his (as you
will soon see if you look at my summary of Essay Twelve -- the full Essay
will appear much later). I do not accept Neurath's criterion of meaning,
since I am not a positivist, logical or otherwise. But that is not the only
difference.

And I was also aware that I am not the first anti-Hegelian Marxist (!!); my
criticisms of Hegel bear no relation to dela Volpe (or Colletti, or....).

Some of my most original material you will find here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2003_01.htm

and here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2005.htm

Even though my ideas are dependent on Frege and Wittgenstein, I apply them
to these areas of DM in a totally new way.

Where else will you find a neo-Fregean/Wittgensteinian dissolution of (but
not solution to)  Zeno's paradox, for example? Or someone who shows exactly
how Hegel's confusion of the 'is' of predication with the 'is' of identity
is the heart of this dialectical beast?

To be sure this is Bertrand Russell's point, but here I share about 1% with
him.

In Essays Three and Twelve I reveal how this confusion arose in ancient
Greece and why leisure-dominated Greek thinkers imagined the world could be
understood by an appeal to abstractions (and thus how super-truths could be
derived from language alone), and how they created these abstractions by a
syntactically inept interpretation of a superficial feature of Indo-European
grammar, and how this destroys the capacity language has for expressing
generality, thus undermining DM itself. DM thus becomes its own
grave-digger; a nice dialectical inversion, this.

[Re Indo-European grammar, Nietzsche had a somewhat similar idea, but I push
it much further, and back it up with a totally new analysis.]

Of course, I could be 100% wrong in all I say, but I defy you to find where
else this stuff can be found.

However I am holding back the vast bulk of the original material for my PhD
thesis (for obvious reasons).

RL


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Farmelant" <farmelantj@juno...>
To: <marxism-thaxis@list...>
Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 1:42 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] People's History of Science


>
>
> On Wed, 1 Mar 2006 13:27:34 -0000 "Rosa Lichtenstein"
> <rosa.lichtenstein3@ntlw...> writes:
>> Charles, thanks for those comments.
>>
>> I absolutely agree, much anti-dialectic stuff is hackneyed to high
>> heaven.
>>
>> As to my claim that my ideas are largely original to me, you will
>> have to
>> check for yourself. What can I say...?
>>
>> "You know. Like that Lenin is using a metaphysical concept when he
>> analyzes
>> "John is a man."   That's not exactly a new criticism."
>>
>> Ah, but if you check the line I take, you will see I do develop it
>> in new
>> ways (along neo-Fregean lines -- if you know of anyone else who has
>> done
>> this, I will be gob-smacked!). And where have you come across this
>> before
>> (posted at Revolutionary Left a few weeks ago)?
>
> I think some other people have attempted similar things in
> the past. You, yourself alluded to Gerald Cohen with his
> *Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence*.
> Concerning your treatment of the Dialectician's Dilemma, didn't
> Sidney Hook advance a similar line of argument in his book,
> *Reason, Social Myths and Democracy*?  And Hook was
> insistent that diamat, while being formally atheist, would
> up smuggling Hegel's God into its concept of matter.
> And Otto Neurath, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle, likewise
> made the equation of metaphysics with ideology long ago.
> Neurath believed that it was possible to ground Marxism without
> appealing to any sort of qausi-Hegelian metaphysics, which
> he rejected as being literally nonsensical and meaningless.
>
> In Italy, the Communist philosopher, Galvano della Volpe
> in writings like his *Logic as a Positive Science* took a
> strongly anti-Hegelian stance, rejecting the Hegelianized
> Marxism that had been handed down in Italy by Gramsci,
> who had been profoundly influenced by Croce and Gentile.
> Della Volpe in his writings talked of dialectics but his
> treatment of the subject drew upon such thinkers as
> John Dewey, David Hume, and even Rudolf Carnap
>
>>
>> "Comrades might like to think about this (taken from my site):
>>
>> The quandary facing dialecticians we might call the "Dialecticians'
>> Dilemma"
>> [DD]. The DD arises from the uncontroversial observation that if
>> reality is
>> fundamentally contradictory then any true theory should reflect this
>>
>> supposed state of affairs. However, and this is the problem, in
>> order to do
>> this such a theory must contain contradictions itself or it would
>> not be an
>> accurate reflection of nature. But, if the development of science is
>>
>> predicated either on the removal of contradictions from theories, or
>> on the
>> replacement of older theories with less contradictory ones, as
>> DM-theorists
>> contend, then science could not advance toward a 'truer' account of
>> the
>> world. This is because scientific theories would then reflect
>> reality less
>> accurately, having had all (or most) of their contradictions
>> removed.
>>
>> [DM = Dialectical Materialism.]
>>
>
>
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