> THERE WAS GOOD SOVIET PHILOSOPHY, ESPECIALLY LOGIC, UNDER AND AFTER
>STALIN. But there hardly any creative Marxist philosophy of any note
>under or after Stalin, and the official Diamat was deadly and is only
>of interest as a chapterof culturala nd political history.
Interesting point. There was some good philosophy, but lots of rubbish. I thought that Ilyenkov in USSR and Zeleny in Czechoslovakia both made pretty positive contributions. But these are rare flowers in an otherwise arid desert. Also there is the psychology of Vygotsky and Luria.
There were also some interesting developments in sociology of literature, like Bakhtin and Propp (? - I mean the morphology of the folk-tale man), and Roman Jakobson - but these were often distrusted, and dissident.
The good scholarship crushed for its tendency is well-known - Pashukanis (Law), Preobrazhensky (economics), II Rubin (economics) etc. etc..
Who would you have in mind, Justin, as the good ones?
I met a Soviet philosopher once, by the name of Irina from Irkutsk. As she described it to me higher education was taught with a great degree of formality - not altogether a bad thing. Lectures were expected to convey a corpus of work according to a regular timetable, as I understood it from her description (maybe I'm exaggerating). I sympathised with her frustration at the slack teaching methods that predominate in the West.
She was very frustrated with the teaching of dialectical materialism, which was utterly lifeless as she experienced it - which also sounds quite plausible. She was re-training herself in the philosophy of Heidegger, which sounds quite a waste to me, but the work she showed me was impressive, if a little unworldly (on 'Ariadne's thread' if I remember right). -- James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99, plus GBP5.01 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'. www.audacity.org