Let's not get personal, Charles, at least not nasty.
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CB: The post heading was a mistake as I was rushing out , and forgot to change the digest format, which has the name at the top. Sorry.
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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.
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CB: What you said was "Matterof fact, I bet you 99 out of 100 Marxist philosopher could do no better." My point is that because many Marxist philosophers, especially in the SU took the lead of Engels and Lenin, and since Lenin and probably Engels were well aware of the late 19th Century "Back to Kant" movement in professional philosophy in Germany, that many ( more than one out of 100) Marxist and Soviet philosophers were aware of and probably some did specialized work on those neo-Kantians.
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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.
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CB: The point here was you were claiming that the general population in the SU didn't take to Marxist philosophy because the Soviet philosophers were so dull and brainless. However, as we see, the North American or whatever category of philosophers you want to call it have no more success than the Soviet philosophers at interesting the general population in philosophy , so it raises questions about you inference that Soviet philosophy is duller or whatever than your schools of philosophy.
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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.
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CB: What is your evidence that this was more true of diamat than of your school of philosophy ? Almost no one reads your school. You are admitting as much on this thread when you claim that no one knows about neo-Kantianism but you and a few others. Seems we could hypothesize that that's true because what you are doing is lethally dull. ( Nothing personal , just there are no Soviet philosophers to raise the reply to you).
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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.
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CB: Whereas there are more than a handful of your school of philosophers who manage to do some decent work ?
Try this on for size. The Soviet philosophers have a different philosophy than you do, so of course you don't like their work.
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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.
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CB: You are the one who made the claim that no one in the SU had a brain after Stalin killed everybody with a brain. This is sort of begging the question. The Soviet position would be that your philosophy is not as good as theirs, don't you think ?
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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.
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CB: I even read some Dilthey in Marshall Sahlins anthropology theory class, and that was just in anthropology. How you can just presume that no Soviet philosophers did specialized work in this area is ....whatever ? They are just as scholarly as you are. But furthermore, they took their lead from Lenin, and Lenin's main discussion is a polemic with neo-Kantians. It is highly likely that Soviet philosophers , students and professors, studied the late 19th Century Kantians. Furthermore, following Hegel's example, and Lenin's proposal, the Soviet philosophers emphasized the _history_ of philosophy ( my books on that are not here right now). In that regard, they are very likely to get to the neo-Kantians.
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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.
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CB: Those aren't comments. They are references.
I have a book right here in my hand _Lenin's "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism"_ by A.O. Sternin, a Soviet philosopher, in which he repeatedly discusses "Neo-Kantianism".
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Lenin may have called Mach a neo-Kantian. That doesn't make him one.
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CB: Your saying Mach was not doesn't make him not one. You have to engage Lenin's arguments to make that point. You'd have to engage Engels and Lenin's whole theory to do this.
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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.
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CB: Actually, he specifically and very clearly differentiates Kant and Hume from Berkeley. Berkeley is a "stone" subjective idealist. Kant is a dualist, sort of half idealist /half materialist, a shamefaced materialist, an agnostic, in Engels' categories.
Lenin says that Mach and Avernius started out as neo-Kantianism with the trend in late 19th Century Germany, and ended up more Berkeleyians.
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As for whether Marxist philosophers have a different philosophy than I do, what does that mean?
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CB: It means that that's the explanation for your dismissing them as dull, brainless, etc.
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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.
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CB: And there are the Marxist philosophers like Ilyenkov , Cornforth, Lawler, Politzer, Hampsch , Philip Moran, Howard Parsons, Hu Xinhe, Li Tieyang etc. , etc. etc. who follow dialectical materialism, Marx , Engels and Lenin, whom you dismiss as dull and brainless. Those are the one's with a different philosophy than you.