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Re: [xmca] Are Fleer and Hedegaard Bernsteinians?



I wonder if mayve one of our Russian friends can help us here? On the basis of the same stories, looking into the roots of Vygotsky's ideas, it seemed to me that Shpet is *not* one of the sources of Vygotsky's ideas on linguistics. I might be 100% wrong, and Martin EG knows more about this than I do, but I gave up reading Shpet after a little while because I found it so uninteresting. It was squarely located in appropriation of Husserl's metaphysics, the same Husserl which Vygotsky so sweepingly dismisses in "Historical Crisis" ("two psychologies, etc"). Though he does refer occasionally to phenomenology, I don't rate these references very highly. Martin I think sees more in them than I do. But the point is, I can see nothing of von Humboldt or German Classicism in Shpet, but much in Vygotsky.

On the other hand, the translator of Shpet says "... from looking over the list of lecture courses of the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of Moscow University between 1905 and 1918 (covering Vygotsky's student days), which contain throughout German language bibliographic data on philosophy."

So I wonder if Shpet really was the mediator in Vygotsky's receipt of the Classical German (v Humboldt and Herder) views on language and thought. Or perhaps he is getting it directly, or from Marx and Plekhanov? Unfortunately, I can find nothing by Potebnya in English.

BTW, if you liked the v Humboldt quote, here is the context: http://marx.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/vhumboldt-wilhelm.htm

Andy

mike cole wrote:
*Andy is a big Goethe fan, and in my limited way, so am I. I always liked
his statement "**Everything has been thought of* before, but the problem is
to think of it again." So Vygotsky learned it all from Shpet but too chicken
to make that public, and Shpet probably learned a lot from Potebnya, and von
Humboldt said it all before any of them, and so on. And if you were to ask
the people they "got it from" those geniuses would all say that the new kid
on the block got it wrong. We are all naives standing on the shoulders of
other naives. It can be annoying. It only gets really irritating when people
act like they are levitating and wondering about why those around them are
standing on the ground, watching the sheep grazing.



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