Let's not get personal, Charles, at least not nasty. I never said I knew most of the Marxist philosophers in the world, just a lot in North America, and its quite true that they, and North American philosophy, has little cultural weight. That's partly the fault of the philosophers, partly a feature of the kind of society we live in, but it's also partly a fault, if it's a fault, of philosophy; done right it's difficult, demanding, and rather esoteric. Also optional in a deep sense. Most people can't be botherred with whether reality is really real. There have been times when philosophy was more popular, even here: Dewey and Williams James have had real mass educated audiences. It would be interesting to think about why and when that happens.
However, there is no invidious comparison to the FSU: almost no one read Soviet diamat who didn't have to. The stuff was lethally dull. There were a handful of Soviet philosophers in the old days who managed to do some decent work--after the early 30s, talking around corners, or (mainly) in pure formal logic, where they could avoid political content. Soviet logicians were excellent when they stuck to logic. But that's basically a branch of mathematics. The diamat was hopeless. As for Stalin's brain, blegh; it was too soaked in blood, paranoia, and lies. I don't pretend to be brilliant, and I am happy to acknowledge that many Soviets were lots smarter than I am. But their social conditions and political repression largely prevented them from doing good philosophy.
As for knowledge of the neoKantians, ask around if you like. I wouldn't presume to tell you what Marxist or other anthropologists know, but I really was a professional philosopher for many years, and indeed had a tolerable competence in German philosophy, which most philosophers don't, and I am highly confident that the neo-Kantians are little read. I mean, who reads Wilhelm Windelband these days? Harry van der Linden wrote a pretty good book on Marxian neo-Kantianism some years back. It may be the only one of its kind, which tells you something. Jim Lawler (a North American Marxist philosopher whom I do indeed know) may have read Harry's book; if he's read much in the people it's about, I'd be surprised. That's not a criticism. I don't knwo those people either. I have read Dilthey and Rickert, non-Marxist neo-Kantian social theorists, but they'repractically the only ones that survive today. ANd I'm unusual in having done that.
Now, as for "interesting comments" that "my group" has on Kant, if you are really interested, you might read my great teacher Gerd Buchdahl's book Kant and the Dynamics of Reason; I was privileged to take Buchdahl's year-long seminar on the first Critique at Cambridge; or (more accessibly perhaps), you can read Peter Strawson's The Bounds of Sense or Jonothan Bennett's diptych Kant's Analytic and Kant's Dialectic, or the books on transcendental idealism and on Kantian freedom by Henry Allison, or Paul Guyer or Ralph Meerbote or Karl Ameriks or Dieter Heinrich . . . . Basically, this is modern Kant scholarship, a profoundly difficult and rigorous enterprise.
Lenin may have called Mach a neo-Kantian. That doesn't make him one. As a philosopher, Lenin was a talented amateur, and I don't think he pretended to be more. He studied Hegel deeply and actually has interesting things to say about Hegel. His comments on Kant are fairly shallow, even silly. He doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between Barkeleyean idealism, which was a major target of Kant's own critique (see the chapter on the Refutation of Idealism in the first Critique), and Kant's transcendental idealism. When it comes to Mach, some of his criticisms are penetrating, others are not. But Mach is no neo-Kantian.
As for whether Marxist philosophers have a different philosophy than I do, what does that mean? Marxist philosophers have all sorts of philosophies. Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, Michael Devitt, the old Richard Miller and the old Hilary Putnam are or were Marxist philosophers, and I'm pretty solidly in their tradition. (Indeed, I was Peter's and Michael's student.) On the other hand I don't have much patience for Althusser, and I don't agree much with Sartre or with a lot of Lukacs, much as I respect them, especially Lukacs.
Enough already.
jks
>From: "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
>Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 16:46:31 -0500
>
>Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
>Subject: Re: marxist sociology
>
> >
> >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.
>
>^^^^^^^
>
>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.
>
>^^^^^
>
>
>
>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.
>
>
>^^^^^^^^^^
>
>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.
>
>^^^^^^
>
>
>^^^^^^
>
>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.
>
>^^^^^^^
>
>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.
>
>^^^^^^^^
>
>
>As for Soviet philosophy, ptowee, there was no such thing after Stalin
>killed almost anyone with a brain in the USSR.
>
>^^^^^
>
>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.
>
>^^^^^
>
>
>
>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.)
>
>^^^^^^^^^
>
>CB: Somehow I think they might say the same thing about your stuff.
>
>^^^^^
>
>
>
>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.
>
>^^^^^^^
>
>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.
>
>
>
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