<< << Also, _The Open Philosophy and its Enemies_ by M.Cornforth is a good
> marxist critique of Popper.
> >>
>
> Sam usually talks good sense, but Cornforth is an idiot. --jks
What makes Cornforth an Inspector Clousseau? Being a stalinist does not
immediately qualify one as an idiot. Many very intelligent people were
stalinists. They had their reasons.
JKS. I didn't say or imply that Cornforth is an idiot because he's a Stalinist. That would be a pretty dumb thing to say. I think that Cornforth is an idiot because he cannot think his way out of a wet paper bag. His writing is a string of predictable cliches. If his Stalinism plays into it, it's because he's a boring party liner that he can't think anything but what he' s supposed to think, but that's only by the way.
SP. I've only read his book on Popper, it
seemed to have some useful discussion on the relation between dialectics
and formal logic.
JKS. Ugh. I don't recall this part, but I rather doubt that it's any good/ There is almost nothging good on dialectics anywhere, Tony Smith's work being the shining exception.
SP: He also clarifies Popper's arguments and shows that they
suffer from the genetic fallacy( Popper was refuting Hegel rather than
Marx) and are aimed, at the most part, at a straw man. Serious critics of
Marx like John Plamenatz and N.Scott Arnold, from what I've read, do not
use Popperian arguments.
JKS. Well, people can differ about how Hegelian Marx is. Scott's Marx is not in the least Hegelian, as you'd expect from an analytical philosopher. I haven't read Plamanatz in years, so I can't comment om hios interpretation--I don't recall it very well. But Popper's is perfectly respectable--maybe wrong, but not dumb. Lukacs' Marx is pretty Hegelian.
SP. I learned a lot from Cornforth's collaborator
J.D. Bernal. I understand Verso has a collection coming out on Bernal, has
anybody read it?
JKS. But Bernal is different. He's a serious historian ogf science. His specific research is dated, but his materialist approach is instructive. In any case Bernal had a mind of his own.
SP. Also, would you throw Kuhn in the social constructivist camp? Seems to me
he tried to distance himself from this position in subsequent editions of
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and in some of his other writings
like the book on Max Planck.
JKS. His official position became _more_ constructivist. Shee the stuff about Darwinin adaptivism replacing truth in the psotscript to the 2d ed. of Structure. The Black-Body problem book is a bit anomalous, since it was hard core history of science rather than philosophy. K was pretty damn constructivist in person when he was my teacher back in 78-79 or thereabouts.
--jks