[lbo-talk] Re: Soviet philosophers

joanna bujes jbujes at covad.net
Sun Nov 2 20:17:04 PST 2003


Well. I can't argue about Vygotsky because I can hardly remember what I read of his. But the other guy I was thinking about, Bakhtin, I would argue for. His "philosophy" is neither professional nor overt, but anyone who concerns himself with philosophy of language, aesthetics, notions of agency, etc., ...would do well to read him.

I think I see philosophy as having a wider scope than you do. For example, I think I would call Dante a (naive) philosopher and Thucydides as well. Lenin is a philosopher when he argues that one should be as "radical as reality"; Trotsky is a philosopher in the way he writes history.

Joanna

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Vygotsky. Though he was a psychologist, and neither Lenin nor Trotsky were philosophers. Lenin wrote and published one book of philosophy that is OK, but would not secure his memory if that was all he had done. He wrote some notebooks on Hegel that have some useful insights. Trotsky participated in a philosophical debate with Dewey in which he did OK, but did not make any significant contribution to philosophy.

There were some Soviet philosophers, strictly so called, who did some good work, though they are little known in the English speaking countries. A lot of them worked ons traight philosophical topics rather than Marxism-Leninism, which was a minefield. Good people stayed away from it. But Anglo-Am philosophers don't knwo who's considered hot in, e.g., Italy, Spain, or the Netherlands, and only a bit about who's hot in France and Germany.



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