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

Mon Nov 5 06:25:33 PST 2018

>From method of political economy whichCHAT people like to quote from:

Along the first path the full
conception was evaporated to yield an abstractdetermination; along the
second, the abstract determinations lead towards areproduction of the
concrete by way of thought.

In this way Hegel fell into the illusionof conceiving
the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probingits own depths,
and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the methodof rising from the
abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thoughtappropriates the
concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. [[But this isby no means the
process by which the concrete itself comes into being.]] Forexample, the
simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposespopulation,
moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well asa certain kind
of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist otherthan as an abstract,
one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, livingwhole. As a category,
by contrast, exchange value leads an antediluvian existence.Therefore, to the
kind of consciousness – and this is characteristic of thephilosophical
consciousness – [[for which conceptual thinking is the real humanbeing, and for
which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality]], [[themovement of the
categories **appears** as the real act of production – which only,unfortunately,
receives a jolt from the outside – whose product is the world; and– but this is
again a tautology – this is correct in so far as the concretetotality is a totality of
thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking andcomprehending;
but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks andgenerates itself
Karl Marx
– 34 –
outside or above observation and conception; a product, [[rather,of the working-up of observation and conception into
concepts.]] [[The totality as it appears in the
head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head,which
appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way differentfrom the artistic,
religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world.]] [[[Thereal subject
retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before]]];namely as
long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merelytheoretical.]]] **[[Hence, in
the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always bekept in mind as
the presupposition.]]**

*THE CONCEPT IS NO MORE REAL THAN REAL*
Haydi
    On Monday, November 5, 2018, 4:08:36 PM GMT+3:30, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:  

 Beth,I too would happily second Martin Packer's book The Science of Qualitative Research. Really excellent explanation of what qualitative research is all about. I wrote a review of it for Theory and Psychology and which is up on my Academia page. Really excellent option if you are interested in getting into the history and if you'd like them to have a good answer to the questions: Why qualitative? and What is qualitative research good for?-greg 
On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 1:33 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

Yes, CLR James brings a very unique reading to Hegel's Logic. I have transcribed only excerpts from it:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/dialecti/index.htm

Andy

   Andy Blunden
 http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm  On 5/11/2018 7:14 PM, WEBSTER, DAVID S. wrote:

Along with Dunayevskaya we must put C L R James’s Notes on Dialectics: Hegel Marx Lenin. James and Dunayevskaya were of course the mainstay of the ‘Johnston Forest’ Tendency(?) They broke from Trotsky in support of the State Capitalist v Workers State understanding of the USSR. Notes on Dialectics is in part a commentary on Lenin on Hegel

From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
 Sent: 04 November 2018 02:02
 To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
 Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: Re: What is science?: Where to start doctoral students?

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

-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball TowerBrigham Young UniversityProvo, UT 84602WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu 
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson  
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