[Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: Re: What is science?: Where to start doctoral students?

Sun Nov 4 02:22:26 PST 2018

 Hi all,
Respectable Beth say they've been booked abundantly and that's true and one fault is people , despite recommendations , have not changed the subject Title so that they (Dear Beth) could have probably guessed that in fact a new thread has been opened the reward and benevolence of which goes to their self as the initiator of the discussion which has entailed to this point of excellent debate though I personally do not want to have full participation.
Alfredo also kindly put a full stop to the discussion (or perhaps to the introduction of the sources) while in fact they should be so happy to have such a discussion because it is a good opportunity for the Editorial to come up with their new stand (as I think) and the good intro they've provided in the MCA Issue which involves Marx and Marxism and Activity Theory. I've even read the first of the original articles there , too. Alfredo with appraisable patience and hard work have provided a very good comment on the book : Vygotsky A Marxist Perspective.
Andy
I'm sufficiently clear with your thoughts and nowadays most of what we might want to discuss seem to be redundant and repetitious. But if I appeared here once again after a long time was that you've , in fact , rendered a great accusation onto Marx Proper. Notice that I didn't say they have ridiculed Hegel. I said that they've ridiculed Hegel's reduction of Ontology to Logic , to the Idea and to the Absolute. For this ridicule I provided evidence from the Originals in length. I over-read them and many others piece by piece and ignored some of the less obvious to the discussion and I didn't find such a thing but to the contrary. I've also read , as you know , Lenin's Critique of Hegel's work. Marx's and Lenin's support and rejection of Hegel have their obvious limits. There are appraisals and there are bare ridicules and all are documented in the original works. I've documented the Ridicule but you've not documented the outright supposed agreement and acceptance (just sent readers to some addresses as usual) ! The one Lenin's quote presented in Red , you well know , does not negate Marx's , Engels' , and Lenin's firm grasp on firstness , precedence , initiality and main stay of Matter over all other phenomena. With all other things we get from Marx and Lenin , we can conjecture that without understanding full Logic in all its features including Hegel's utmost persistence to make concessions between his Indispensable Time-Urgent Supreme and the Material World Surrounding him incapacitated to his limits and capabilities , one cannot reach the doubt-free acceptance of the Last Idealist Hegel and the alright preferences of the Materialist outlook of Marx and the true Marxists. Have you not encountered Lenin's evaluation of Hegel's works as "near materialist" , "smacks of materialism" , "much better than vulgar materialism" , and as well , "mere nonsense" in numerous occasions , "the worst of Idealism" , "I don't understand him here" , etc. By no means and for indubious reasons can Marx's Ontology be the Ontology of the Idea and by no means can a true marxist instill such an Idea with Corporeality (Engels -out of Nothing which means it's Nothing empty of contradictions , differences , moments for Unity-the attached) . What was YOUR take on the Attached?
BestHaydi    

    On Sunday, November 4, 2018, 5:33:41 AM GMT+3:30, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:  

Yes, Martin, Marx and Hegel can both be counted as Aristotleans, though self-evidently only "in a certain way." Hegel was so much an admirer of Aristotle that Aristotle is the only great philosopher who is not pinned at a certain finite point in the "unfolding of the Idea" in Hegel's History of Philosophy, and at the completion of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, when it comes full circle to a fully reconstructed Being, Hegel merely quotes a passage from Aristotle in the original Greek, without translation!

The restoration of Hegel to his proper place in Marxism was begun by Lenin in 1914:

“It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch03.htm#LCW38_180a

 and continued via Korsch and Lukacs, the early Frankfurt School and Dunayevskaya. It was given a particular boost with the emergence of "Marxist Humanism" (in opposition to Althusser's structuralism and the East European Stalinist bureaucracies) from Eastern Europe in the 1960s.

The origins of Marx's philosophical (not political) views in Hegel is now a commonplace which only the blind do not see (if they bother to look).

Andy

 Andy Blunden
 http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm  On 4/11/2018 3:01 AM, Martin Packer wrote:

 Andy, thinking about your question I went aGooglin’ and discovered that Carol Gould’s book is available online: 
   Gould, C. C. (1978). Marx’s social ontology: Individuality and community in Marx’s theory of social relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
  <https://philarchive.org/archive/GOUMSO-3> 
  I hadn’t noticed when first reading this book that Gould credits Marx Wartofsky for his help developing the theoretical framework. The book defends five theses; she summarizes the first two as follows:     
My first thesis is that Marx uses Hegel's dialectical logic both as a method of inquiry and as a logic of history. That is, not only is Marx's analysis ordered in accordance with a Hegelian dialectic, but the actual dcvelopment of historical stages itself is seen to have such a dialectical form.!Thus, on the one hand, Marx derives the specific structure and development of social forms from the concepts of these forms, but, on the other hand, he sees this derivation as possible because the concepts are themselves abstracted from the concrete social developmenL, 

My second thesis is that in construing Hegel's logic of concepts also as a logic of social reality, Marx becomes an Aristotelian. He holds that it is real, concretely existing individuals who constitute this social reality by their activity. 
     Martin

 On Nov 2, 2018, at 10:17 PM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote: 

I think it would be more true to say that in Marx's day "Ontology" was only used in the non-countable form; the countable (i.e. plural) form of "Ontology" is a product I think of the second half of the 20th Century. Martin? can you pinpoint it? I think that Marx agreed with Hegel's reduction of Ontology to Logic, though he also had differences over Hegel's formulation of it - the famous "Method of Political Economy" passage which CHAT people like to quote, explains it. Hegel's "Ontology" (Die Lehre vom Sein) is usually translated into English as "The Doctrine of Being." Hegel's reduction of Ontology to Logic is explained in the Preface to the Phenomenology, already mentioned, and implemented in the first book of the Logic.

Andy

   Andy Blunden
 http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm  On 3/11/2018 3:28 AM, Greg Thompson wrote:

  I sent the following message off-line to Beth. I'll send it here without the attachments just in case someone is watching...  They should be publicly accessible. (and funny that Wagner also happened across the same book that I did, behold the power of Google!). 
  Wagner, simple story with ontology, in anthropology at least, is that it has been pluralized so that people now speak of different ontologies. Science is just one of them. In many ways this is anti-Marxist since Marx imagined just one ontology (and science was going to get to the bottom of it!), but I'd like to think that this move isn't entirely irreconcilable with all readings of Marx. 
  -greg 
  ---------- Forwarded message ---------
 From: Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
 Date: Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 2:40 PM
 Subject: Re: [Xmca-l] Re: What is science?: Where to start doctoral students?
 To: Beth Ferholt <bferholt@gmail.com> 
      Beth, 
  This may be more than you bargained for but Latour has been doing some interesting thinking/writing on this issue, reported secondarily here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html

  I have also attached his essay Why has critique run out of steam? (as well as the intro from Pandora's Hope "Do you believe in reality?") which was an early articulation of this  particular (re)articulation of his position. 
  Goodwin's Professional Vision also comes to mind (also attached). 
  And for kicks, I just googled your question and found this book that really seems to be a very smart approach: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=s13tBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=what+is+science%3F&ots=hG7y6xF0gy&sig=DNMs__6vnoZUvXbOelWC8DcL4ns#v=onepage&q=what%20is%20science%3F&f=false

  I was thinking of "rigorous storytelling" as one answer to your question. I googled and found that I've already been outdone - Susan Porter has "triple-rigorous storytelling" based on her work with food justice. Might be of interest depending on your students' projects: https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/view/fd-triple

  Best of luck! -greg 

  On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 9:33 AM Beth Ferholt <bferholt@gmail.com> wrote:

Great. Kuhn and Thinking and Speech are two of the few things on my list already and I’ll start reading the other two, sensible or no, now! Thanks so much, Beth

 On Thursday, November 1, 2018, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

Beth, much as a part of me would like to recommend the Preface to Hegel's Phenomenology, being sensible I would still recommend:

   - The first chapter of Thinking and Speech https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch01.htm
   - Marx's Method of Political Economy https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3
   - And they should read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions    
 https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/kuhn.htm   

 Who knows? You might be fostering an original thinker?
 Andy
   Andy Blunden
 http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm  On 1/11/2018 11:43 PM, Beth Ferholt wrote:

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 10:09 AM Beth Ferholt <bferholt@gmail.com> wrote:

 I'm starting to take the role of advisor on doctoral dissertations and wonder how best to begin to discuss "what  is science?" with students who will need to respond concisely when asked about the rigor and reliability  of their formative intervention, narrative and/or autobiographical studies. 
  I'm looking for an overview or paper that does more than argue the value of one approach --  something to start them off thinking about the issues, not immerse them in one perspective quite yet. 
  If not an overview then maybe a paper that contextualizes "rigor" and "reliability". 

  Obviously this is an endless topic but do some people reading XMCA have some favorite papers  that they give to their advisees or use when they teach a methods class? 
  Thanks! Beth
 -- 
      Beth Ferholt
 Associate Professor, Department of Early Childhood and Art Education; Affiliated Faculty, CUNY Graduate Center Brooklyn College, City University of New York
 2900 Bedford Avenue
 Brooklyn, NY 11210-2889

 Email: bferholt@brooklyn.cuny.edu
 Phone: (718) 951-5205
 Fax: (718) 951-4816

 -- 
     Beth Ferholt
 Associate Professor, Department of Early Childhood and Art Education; Affiliated Faculty, CUNY Graduate Center Brooklyn College, City University of New York
 2900 Bedford Avenue
 Brooklyn, NY 11210-2889

 Email: bferholt@brooklyn.cuny.edu
 Phone: (718) 951-5205
 Fax: (718) 951-4816

  -- 
     Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology
  880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602 WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu 
 http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson      

  -- 
     Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology
  880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602 WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu 
 http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson      

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