I said: >
> > I think better of M&EC than these writers do. It's an amateur effort
> > by a
> > brilliant writer without philosophical training, and it has the
> > strengths
> > and weaknesses one would esxpect of such a work. Hilary Putnam used
> > it as a
> > text in his phil of science class at Harvard in the late 60s, back
> > when he
> > was a Marxist. The Hegel stuff is deeper, but far lessd polished.
>
>Although it has long been fashionable for professional philosophers
>to deride Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and to poke holes in
>Lenin's arguments,
Well, poking holes in arguments is what philosophers do, after all.
some professional philosophers have
>expressed admiration for it. I seem to recall reading that Antony
>Flew (himself a right-winger) has had kind words for it.
>
Really! Flew _is_ a real right-winger, a pretty serious theist too. On the other hand, he's a realist, so Lenin's realist arguments would appeal to him.
All that aside, I have always been puzzled by Lenin's fervent belief that "empiriocriticism" was a "reactionary" position associated with theism and bourgeois ideology, and incompatible with socialist or revolutionary politics. I mean, this is all aside from the merits of his arguments against the truth of the position. He might be right about realism, and I think, ion broad terms that he is, and yet it is odd that he thought it politically important enough to polemicize about it. After all, the empiriocritics were, and most empiricists are, Enlightenment agnostics or atheists; Hume of course was a famously savage critic of religion (if Berkeley was a bishop). A number of distinguished empiricists that Lenin would have known about were socialists if not revolutionaries, e.g., J.S. Mill (not that Lenin would have had much patience for Mill's relentlessly bourgeois socialism--does he talk about Mill anywhere? I can't recall that he does). Although this was after Lenin's time, I have remarked here that the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle were radicals, revolutionary socialists, and (in Neurath's case) Marxist, with the exception of Schlick.
And the philosophical materialism has nothing, logically, by way of connection with historical materialism. One might well be an out-and-out phenomenalist and still think that in social explanation the economy was primary, etc. Gramsci was clearly some sort of antirealist, a conventionalist and social constructionist in the tradition of Croce, but if he wasn't a Marxist revolutionary, no one was.
So, any speculation about why Leninw ould have thjought that philosophical materialism was politically important?
jks
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