>
>Justin: Matterof fact, I bet you 99 out of 100
>Marxist philosopher could do no better.
>
>^^^^^^^
Charles (below) says that Marxist philosophers would know about Kant. But that's not what I said they wouldn't know; I said they would know about the neo-Kantians of the late 19th century, something that almost no one except specialized scholars of the history of German philosophy would know.
Since I was once in the biz and actually know a good proportion of the Marxist philosophers in North America, I think I can say on the basis of personal knowledge that (a) almost none have heard of or read anything by a neo-Kantian, and (b) very few of them have what I would consider a more than amateurish notion of Kant himself. But Kant is a difficult speciality. I have had five(!) classes in the Critique of Pure Reason from people who are among the deepest Kant scholars of our era , and I don't consider myself to be any sort of an expert.
Be that as it may, I was talking about the Marxist philosophers knowlege of the neoKantians, not Kant I don't insult the Marxists to say that their knowledge of the n-Ks is small; it's not that almost anyone else would know more. The n-Ks are a largely forgotten backwater. Mach (about whom I do know a fair amount) was not by any stretch a neo-Kantian. He's plainly an empiricist.
As for Soviet philosophy, ptowee, there was no such thing after Stalin killed almost anyone with a brain in the USSR. I have had the misfortune to have actually read a lot of Soviet so-called dialectical materialism, and a drearer lot of glock I never tried to slog through. (I feel sorry for my former OSU colleague Jim Scanlan, who actually wrote a book (quite a good one, very fair and sympathetic, though for that reason all the more devastating) about Marxism in the USSR.) No wonder Marxism had such a weak grip on the peoples of the FSU: their exposure to it, such as it was, was largely through diamat textbooks of leaden orthodozy and obvious dishonesty. The comments of most official Soviet philosophy about Kant were basically predictable, unininteresting, and largely wrong.
jks
jks
>
>CB: A Marxist _philosopher_ would be following the lead of both Engels and
>Lenin who paid attention to Kant and neo-Kantians, such as Mach. Engels
>even uses "things-in-themselves" and adds "things-for-us", creatively
>developing Kant as one of his fundamental concepts. He criticizes Kant,
>but preserves some of Kant's concepts in his own development of the
>subject. Krupskaya mentions Lenin studying Kant while in exile in Siberia.
>You don't think Ilyenkov , Cornforth , or James Lawler or Politzer know
>about Kant ? I have a book right here in my hand by Marxist philosoher
>A.O. Sternin in which neo-Kantianism is discussed. Socalled "Classical
>German philosophy" including Kant is important to Marxist philosophers.
>Lenin specifically urged that philosophers especially in the German
>classical tradition be studied, so it is very likely that Kant was in the
>Soviet philosophy curriculum.
>
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