--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
> ^^^^
> CB: To play the Devil's advocate to Aquinas'
> advocacy for God, dialectical
> materialism _a posteriori_ ( not presupposes) , not
> a dead , mechanistic
> universe, but a moving, dialectical universe. There
> is nothing but matter
> and its mode of existence is _motion_ (i.e. ,not
> dead). So, there is matter,
> substance, not form; yes, perhaps "bursting" all
> over the place.
> "Self-guided" in the sense that the motion follows
> laws or patterns that can
> be discovered.
FWIW I think Marx and Engels (unlike what Lenin thought) had an implicitly pantheistic, Spinozist, quasi-Leibnizian understanding of nature. (I say "quasi" because Leibniz did believe in the watchmaker universe -- he was trying to reconcile it with Aristotle.)
Maybe it will turn out that evolution toward "higher" forms of life just doesn't have a cause. Maybe it is its own law, like gravitational attraction. Nobody tries to figure out a mechanism of gravitation (though Newton tried) -- it's just there, a mathematical relation describing correlations of quantity of acceleration, vector of motion, distance between bodies and mass.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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