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

Mon Nov 5 00:14:20 PST 2018

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>”
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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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:

  1.  The first chapter of Thinking and Speech https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch01.htm
  2.  Marx's Method of Political Economy https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3
  3.  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<mailto: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<https://maps.google.com/?q=2900+Bedford+Avenue+Brooklyn,+NY+11210&entry=gmail&source=g>
Brooklyn, NY 11210<https://maps.google.com/?q=2900+Bedford+Avenue+Brooklyn,+NY+11210&entry=gmail&source=g>-2889

Email: bferholt@brooklyn.cuny.edu<mailto: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<mailto: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://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://greg.a.thompson.byu.edu/>
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson

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