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>Justin: Matterof fact, I bet you 99 out of 100
>Marxist philosopher could do no better.
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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.
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CB: I'll look it up , but I'm pretty sure that Lenin uses the term "neo-Kantian" to describe Mach , who lived in the late 19th Century. So, we can be pretty sure that some Marxist philosophers use the term neo-Kantians.
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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.
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CB: How about James Lawler ? He's in North America. But of course, there are goo gobs of Marxist philosophers outside of North America, so ...what are you talking about. The term "Marxist philosophers" is no way confined to North America, and I doubt very much that you know most Marxist philosophers in the world.
As for your judgment of their understanding, I wonder what they think about what you understand. Maybe we can contact some of them.
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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.
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CB: Well, as I say , Lenin calls Mach a neo-Kantian. I'll look it up tomorrow. Evidently, Marxists philosophers have a different idea about neo-Kantianism than you do. In general , Marxist philosophers seem to have a different philosophy than you do.
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As for Soviet philosophy, ptowee, there was no such thing after Stalin killed almost anyone with a brain in the USSR.
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CB: Sorry, I'll go with the Soviet philosophers , and there are plenty post-Stalin, over your judgment of their brains. Shhhheesh. Try Ilyenkov , for one. I'll bring in about ten more names tomorrow.
As far as I can tell Stalin's brain was as big as yours.
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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.)
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CB: Somehow I think they might say the same thing about your stuff.
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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.
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CB; Whereas , you North American philosophers have such a strong following in North America - NOT. People here pay about as much attention to philosophers as they do to Medieval basket weaving. Show me some interesting comment that your group has on Kant.