On Sat, 09 Feb 2002 08:37:42 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>
>
> It seems to me that a precondition nearly for making sense of Engels
> is
> expressed in the dedication of _The Dialectical Biologist_ (Levins &
> Lewontin):
>
> To Frederick Engels,
> who got it wrong a lot of the time
> but who got it right where it counted
>
> A point by point 'defense' of Engels (as in the USSR) is an insult
> to
> his memory rather than a defense, but the frequent contempt for him
> shown by many "Western" marxists and "post"-Marxists is itself
> contemptible.
I would also add concerning Engels and the theory of relativity, that in his *The Dialectics of Nature* and in other writings as well, Engels in large degree, anticipated the sort of critique of the postulates of Newtonian physics, that was later developed (in a positivist form) by Ernst Mach in his *The Science of Mechanics* - a book that profoundly influenced the young Albert Einstein, and indeed influenced most of the leading physicists of his generation. Engels challenged the Newtonian postulates concerning an absolute time and an absolute space, which he considered to be symptomatic of metaphysical as opposed to dialectical thought. BTW much of the Soviet physicists' defense of relativity consisted of their pointing out the degree to which Engels had in fact anticipated the insights of Mach and of Einstein.
Jim F.
>
> Carrol
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