[Xmca-l] Отв: Re: Отв: Re: Ilyenkov, Marx, & Spinoza

[Alexandre Sourmava]

Dearfriends!

Hi all!
First, excuse me for the delay with my reaction to your posts.

David,thank you for your kind advice with more exact translation of word «условный». I agree with you, that the best translation willbe conventional. This term coincides well enoughwith Vygotsky’s idea that mature word in developmentof infants speech is something entirely "random","reason-less", and "irrational", something established by mereagreement (conventions). (See “Орудие и знак в развитии ребенка”) 
As for Vygotsky's attitude to Pavlov and his entirely Cartesian theory, I’llagree with David again, I do think that it was not mere discretion. Pavlov’s “teaching”was canonized as something ideologically obligatory substantially later, closerto 1950 – the year of so called Pavlovian session of the Soviet Academy ofScience. So a fresh trauma of this “historical event” evidently shade in Luria’sand Leont’ev’s mind the earlier situation. The affinity of Vygotsky's idea ofHMF and Pavlov's Second Signaling System is not something coincidental. Anyhow,this subject deserves seriousinquiry.
Mike, your historical meetingwith Bernshtein was something fabulous!!! Have you a chance to have a chat with him this time or later, and have you discussed withAlexander Romanovitch Bernstein’s ideas?
Thank you Mike for attached pdf with “Soviet psychology”. It is somethingfantastically interesting. I am much younger than heros of thisbook, so even from my soviet perspective it looks extremely colourful :-) and indeedit explains much…
Andy, I like very much your witty formula “In the 21st century, Spinoza is no longer adead dog, but he is a dead end” :-)
But I decisively disagree with you…
I probably have too many objections to Vygotsky's theorizing, but regarding Spinoza’s(and Marx’s) role in future psychology I agree with him absolutely.
I can not agree with you that “Any attempt to deploy Spinozian ontology in experimental Psychologyis a charade” too. Surely, it is impossible to try to apply Spinozian ideas tobased on primitive Cartesian logic (and even this in the best case) so called “experimental Psychology”. 
However, I’m sure that Hegels’smoto that Spinozism is a necessary basis of any genuine philosophizing is as true now as it was twohundred years ago, and that it can be applied to psychology as well.  
All the best!

Sasha

In afew days I hope to finish updating of full Russian version of the article “Ilyenkovand revolution in psychology” and I will put it here and on Academy.edu 

    пятница, 28 июля 2017 3:32 mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> писал(а):
 

 David-

Your wrote, in part.

Mike--thanks for the stuff on pedology. I remember the text--I remember
discussing it with you, and how personally affronted you felt by it,
actually--but the Genevans (Bernard Schneuwly, Jean-Paul Bronckart, Irina
Leopoldoff-Martin) are trying to establish pedology as a "once and future
discipline", and this is a project I feel very much part of these days. So
I am starting to feel as you do about it.

Very interesting to be pointed back to the prior discussion. I had
forgotten it.
Re-reading it, it seems I was not distressed by the intro essay, which I
did not focus on,
but by Leontiev's writing, which Clay Spinuzzi asked about.

I locked in on that quotation because it identified where LSV stood with
the powers that
were and a view of pedology that is where Leontiev stood at the time.
Notice that Luria
is not included in the book.

His book on the role of speech in the development of normal and abnormal
behavior, which is on the lchc web site, grew out of talks given in London
in the late 1950's where he was using second signal language as a mode of
survival ( i believe). The internal tensions within the group associated
with LSV must have been horrendous. Brrrrr.

Good luck on the project to re-cover pedology. It needs recovering!

mike




mike







On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 4:59 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Right, Ivan. For Halliday, the difference is "instantiation"--instances of
> matter and instances of meaning. The point is that there aren't two
> different phenomena, one infinite and another finite. They are just two
> different ways of looking at the same thing, like climate and weather, or
> language and text, or culture and situation. A table is an "instance" of
> meaning en-mattered (to mint a meaning), and an idea is an "instance" of
> matter en-meaninged.
>
> I don't actually think that either matter or meaning is infinite in exactly
> the sense that Spinoza had in mind: for my purposes, it is enough to think
> of a culture as the sum total of all the historical situations, and its
> language as the sum total of all of its produced texts. When I have to
> think about the universe, I just think of it as the sum total of all the
> actually existing matter and all the existing meaning. For now. But to tell
> the truth, I think about the universe even less than it thinks about me: I
> am afraid I feel more akin to Spinoza the lens grinder than to Spinoza the
> philosopher.
>
> Mike--thanks for the stuff on pedology. I remember the text--I remember
> discussing it with you, and how personally affronted you felt by it,
> actually--but the Genevans (Bernard Schneuwly, Jean-Paul Bronckart, Irina
> Leopoldoff-Martin) are trying to establish pedology as a "once and future
> discipline", and this is a project I feel very much part of these days. So
> I am starting to feel as you do about it.
>
> Right now I am writing about questions--how they are formed, how they are
> used, and how we turn them back on themselves--e.g. what I just did. One of
> the real problems with Vygotsky's model of concept formation is what
> Ruqaiya Hasan called its overly experiential focus (the focus on
> representations). It seems to me that if we think about the adolescent
> forming a world view in interpersonal terms (that is, inevitably including
> affect and social power as well as representations of events and entities),
> we find that "question" is sometimes more useful than "concept".
>
> dk
>
> On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 7:49 AM, Ivan Uemlianin <ivan@llaisdy.com> wrote:
>
> > Dear David
> >
> > Sorry to quibble, but your email (4th para) doesn't seem to be using
> > "mode" in the same way as Spinoza (in the Ethics). In the Ethics,
> Substance
> > has infinite Attributes, two of which (the only two humans can be
> affected
> > by) are Extension and Thought. Modes are finite particulars (eg tables
> and
> > ideas).
> >
> > How Spinoza would categorise the laws of thermodynamics is a whole nother
> > question.
> >
> > Best wishes
> >
> > Ivan
> > @ilyenkov_et_al
> >
> >
> > --
> > festina lente
> >
> >
> > > On 27 Jul 2017, at 22:26, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Actually, Andy, there are people who defend Spinoza's formulation of a
> > > single substance with two modes. Halliday is one. I am another.
> > >
> > > Consider the way in which you read Hegel. You don't actually use the
> term
> > > for an explanatory principle which he chose, namely "Geist" or
> "Spirit".
> > > Sometimes you use Leontiev's term, "Activity", and sometimes you use
> your
> > > own, much more Spinozan, term: "project".
> > >
> > > Spinoza actually TELLS us how to read his explanatory principle "Deus
> > Sive
> > > Natura", or "God, that is to say, Nature". So the is one substance, and
> > we
> > > can call it "Nature". Culture has to be understood as an emergent part
> of
> > > that nature.
> > >
> > > The two modes are matter, of course, and a form of organization of that
> > > matter, a kind of countercurrent to entropy, we can call "meaning".
> > Meaning
> > > matter that has been organized in some way to stand for something that
> is
> > > not itself. Nature is one substance, with two modes: matter, that is
> > > subject to the laws of thermodynamics (laws which do indeed distinguish
> > > between past and future, just as Peter does), and meaning, which is
> > matter
> > > that has granted itself temporary surcease from them.
> > >
> > > David Kellogg
> > > Macquarie University
> > >
> > > PS: I always thought that the great advantage of "project" over
> > "activity"
> > > was that it demystifies how this temporary surcease might work among
> > > humans. To understand Spinoza's idea of "God"as a semiotic version of
> > > "Nature" all we really have to do is to ask ourselves what "projects"
> > might
> > > look like among non-human, non-sentient, and non-living entities:
> > colonies,
> > > ecologies, and systems.
> > >
> > > dk
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
>
> "The Great Globe and All Who It Inherit:
> Narrative and Dialogue in Story-telling with
> Vygotsky, Halliday, and Shakespeare"
>
> Free Chapters Downloadable at:
>
> https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/2096-the-great-
> globe-and-all-who-it-inherit.pdf
>
> Recent Article: Thinking of feeling: Hasan, Vygotsky, and Some Ruminations
> on the Development of Narrative in Korean Children
>
> Free E-print Downloadable at:
>
> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8Vaq4HpJMi55DzsAyFCf/full
>