----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Farmelant" <farmelantj at juno.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 6:51 PM Subject: Re: marxist sociology
>
> I think a final evaluation of Soviet philosophy remains to be
written.
> It
> seems to me that some quite substantive work was done in the early
> years of the Soviet Union. Certainly, the debates in the 1920s
between
> the Mechanists and the Dialecticians seem to be of some interest,
> revolving as they did around some perennial issues in Marxist
philosophy.
> (Stalin BTW settled that debated by fiat). Stalin's rule as Justin
quite
> correctly
> points out put a severe crimp on any truly original work in Soviet
> philosophy,
> since most of the best thinkers and scholars were (if they were
lucky
> found
> themselves in Siberia) and very often were simply liquidated. Many
of
> the
> scholars at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, who oversaw
> the publication of Marx's earlier writings (like the 1844
Manuscripts)
> simply "disappeared" during the 1930s.
>
> The "thaw" that occured upon Khruschev's ascension to power, saw
> a revival of Soviet philosophy. It was during the "thaw" that
Ilyenkov
> (http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/) first rose to prominence
for
> instance. Justin points out that Soviet philosophers did important
work
> in logic, and it was during the time of the "thaw" that the Czech
born
> Soviet philosopher Ernst Kolman disucssed the relations between
> formal logic and dialectical logic, in which he proposed that
dialectics
> was actually completely compatible with Aristotelian logic, and that
> we should be wary of identifying "dialectical contradictions" with
> the kinds of contradictions treated in formal logic. In his view,
> dialectics
> did not violate Aristotle's law of non-contradiction.
>
> In the late Soviet period, some interesting work was done in the
> philosophy
> of science. Igor Naletov's *Alternatives to Positivism* provides a
> well-informed assessment of Anglo-American work in the field
> from a Soviet Marxist standpoint, and indeed it does seem to have
> been the case that many Soviet philosophers did take a strong
> interest in Anglophone analytic philosophy. Dmitry Gorski's
> writings such as his *Generalisation and Cognition* for instance
> betrays a knowledge of the Anglophone literature in logic and
> analytic philosophy. Both Naletov and Gorski provide ample
discussions
> of such thinkers as Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Popper, Quine,
> and Kuhn amongst others, while adhering to a broadly dialectical
> materialist standpoint. In fact it seems that one characteristic
> of Soviet philosophy was while it on the one hand pledged its
> loyalty to a strict orthodoxy, it was still (at least following
Stalin's
> death) able to absorb ideas and techniques from other philosophical
> traditions. I seem to recall reading a book many years ago by John
> Somerville on Soviet philosophy which made exactly that point.
> Even in Stalin's time it was customary for Soviet philosophers
> to be assigned to specialize in the work of one or more particular
> Western bourgeois philosophers, in order to refute their ideas.
> Very often this resulted in the Soviet philosopher in absorbing
> many of the ideas of the thinkers that he was supposed to be
> refuting.
>
> Jim F.
www.juno.com/get/web/.
==================
I'm real rusty on this so feel free to stomp but I think it was Jan Lukasiewicz' 3 and then multi-valued logics that catalyzed the robust explorations of post Aristotelian logic in the SU. Dialetheism relaxes the 'law' of non-contradiction and makes for some really interesting -chaotic- dynamics in non-monotonic systems. The whole relaxation approach on the lnc comes, as far as we can tell, from Indian philosophy. An interesting text on the issues is Alexander Argyros' "The Blessed Rage for Order."
< http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/ >
Ian