The 1989 revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe and the subsequent transitions have commonly been interpreted in political terms, as movements towards democracy, or in economic terms, as escape from the command economy towards the free market. We revisit the problem to suggest a different reading. We argue that in the legitimization crisis of real socialism, a pivotal role was played by the burden of social oversaturation and bureaucratic arbitrariness, which met its desired alternative in social imaginaries of impersonal, objective (...) social system. For the citizens of Central and East European countries, this fantasy was matched by the promise of the free market, which was morally contrasted to the experience of daily life under late socialism. We argue that this desire to escape from arbitrariness to objectivity is a particularly strong motive in the imaginary of modernity which found one of its historical manifestations in the disappointment with real socialism. (shrink)

This paper deals with the ontological foundations of the Soviet interpretation of dialectical materialism as exemplified by one of its “founding fathers,” Abram Deborin, in his works of the late 1920s. It has been claimed that the “ontologizing” tendency in Soviet philosophy is due to the influence of Friedrich Engels and his ideas pertaining to the dialectics of nature. However, a more plausible interpretation is that the ontologism of Soviet philosophy is connected with the rejection of the Kantian Copernican turn (...) in philosophy and the idea of the primacy of gnoseology it implies. In this article, I argue in favor of the latter thesis. Ontologism, i.e., the tendency to give priority in philosophy to questions concerning Being, and anti-Kantianism are but two sides of the same coin. (shrink)

Az alábbi tanulmány a Jugoszláv Kommunisták Szövetségének (JKSZ) nemzetiségi doktrínájáról és politikájáról, valamint a JKSZ egyik prominens vajdasági magyar teoretikusának, Rehák Lászlónak az idevágó írásairól szól. Rehák Lenin és Kardelj nyomán magyarázza a nemzetiségi kérdés összefüggését a gazdasággal. Habár a munkáiban nincs nyílt kritika az alkotmányos renddel és a politikával szemben, amellett érvelek, hogy ha összeszedjük az elszórt és valamicskét burkolt kritikai megjegyzéseit, világos, hogy elég jól látta a rezsim hibáit és igazságtalanságait.

The paper investigates the distinctly Chinese intertwining of expertise and state & financial capital to enrich the current understanding of neoliberalism as a hegemonic governing rationale. Since the summer of 2015, China has been experiencing one of its most severe financial crises since the adoption of a ‘socialist market economy’ in 1978. However, globally circulating narratives have failed to look beyond a Western-centric corollary, rehashing a critique of the Chinese one-party system and its lack of a ‘genuine’ free market. By (...) exploring the specific genealogy of Chinese capitalism, and the distinctive Chinese financial-market structure, the article will show how the scientific authority of experts formulated amongst neoliberal thinkers never permeated the Chinese idea of knowledge. In the Chinese variety of financial capitalism, expertise is seen to lie not so much in the wisdom of individual experts as in their socio-political support, which legitimises their economic interventions. (shrink)

The question of the relationship between social values and beliefs and the economy has always been a subject of intense scholarly inquiry and debate. To this day; it continues to receive greater attention; especially in the contemporary era where intensifying globalisation processes have brought to light questions such as religious and cultural diversity and the challenges as well as opportunities that they present. As Ray and Sayer pointed out; there has since the dawn of the twenty first century; been a (...) ‘cultural turn’ characterised by strong interest in questions of links between culture and economy. This article provides a critical review of perspectives on the links between culture; religion; economy and development. While greater attention is drawn to cultural values; some contrast between religion and culture is however provided to avoid tendency to confuse both concepts. Including religion is also necessary as its values; like cultural values; have social significance. Thus understanding their role has bearing on understanding that of cultural values. The central purpose of the review is to provide a basis for examining claims about the role of the indigenous African culture of ubuntu in South Africa’s post-apartheid development. (shrink)

A paradox, according to the OED, is ‘a statement seemingly self-contradictory or absurd, though possibly well-founded or essentially true’. In this article I shall try to show that the classical orthodox Marxist view of morality is a paradox. I shall seek to resolve the paradox by trying to show that it is only seemingly self-contradictory or absurd. But I shall not claim the standard Marxist view of morality to be well-founded or essentially true. On the contrary, I shall suggest that, (...) though coherent, it is ill-founded and illusory. (shrink)

Po pádu totalitárních systémů, jež spočívaly na marxistické ideologii, se sociální věda začala k dialektice chovat rezervovaně, případně ji zcela vyloučila z legitimního instrumentária vědy. Studie se na pozadí vývoje a proměn dialektiky v různých sociologických koncepcích snaží odpovědět tři otázky: a) nakolik je „dialektická sociologie“ možná, b) zda nejde o redundantní termín, c) ukázat elementární principy, jimiž se „dialektické zkoumání“ sociální reality může či má řídit. V závěru ukazuje rozdílnost principů tzv. lazarsfeldovského a radikálně kritického paradigmatu v empirickém výzkumu.

This paper argues that Nietzsche is a critic of just the kind of genealogical debunking he is popularly associated with. We begin by showing that interpretations of Nietzsche which see him as engaging in genealogical debunking turn him into an advocate of nihilism, for on his own premises, any truthful genealogical inquiry into our values is going to uncover what most of his contemporaries deem objectionable origins and thus license global genealogical debunking. To escape nihilism and make room for naturalism (...) without indiscriminate subversion, we then argue, Nietzsche targets the way of thinking about values that permits genealogical debunking: far from trying to subvert values simply by uncovering their origins, Nietzsche is actively criticising genealogical debunking thus understood. Finally, we draw out the consequences of our reading for Nietzsche’s positive vision. (shrink)

Several years ago Guglielmo Carchedi (2008; 2012) published in S&S two interesting pieces on Marx’s dialectics and mathematics. His basic aim was to discover whether Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts provide a new insight into Marx’s dialectics. The reading he suggested was addressed to Marx alone, i.e., without Hegel and Engels. This, he argued, is the only way to grasp Marx’s dialectics if one wants to understand Marx in his own terms. Since Marx never explicated his notion of dialectics, we ought to (...) derive it from Marx’s own work. To this end, Carchedi first defined “dialectics as a method of social research” (Carchedi, 2008, 416), and then listed three principles of dialectics: 1) “all phenomena are always both realized and potential”; 2) “they are always both determinant and determined”; 3) they are “always subject to movement and change” (ibid.). Later he added a fourth principle: 4) “social phenomena’s movement (change) is tendential” (Carchedi, 2012, 547). He emphasized that these principles are limited to society and not to be confused with nature, because society, unlike nature, necessarily involves “human volition and consciousness” (ibid.). For this reason, “Engels’ dialectics of nature cannot be applied to society” (ibid.), a claim he also asserted in his book Behind the Crisis (2011, 37–8). (shrink)

Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx and Engels’ works has been somewhat a common but rather unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a case in point. A bold line seems to shape the entire Engels debate and separate two opposite views in this regard: Engels the contaminator of Marx’s materialism vs. Engels the self-started genius of dialectical materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has (...) not enjoyed so far is a critical reflection upon the relationship between different layers of this text: authorial, textual, editorial and interpretational. Informed by a historical hermeneutic, inquiry into the elements that structure the debate on “Dialectics of Nature,” and into the different political and philosophical functions attached to it, makes it possible to relocate the meaning of “dialectics” in a more precise context. Engels’ dialectics is less complete than we usually think it is, but he achieved more than most scholars would like to admit. (shrink)

For decades, the question of whether dialectics applies to nature has been a hotly debated topic in the Marxian literature. A number of authors have claimed that the Marxist outlook on nature and natural sciences has been for-mulated by Engels alone. According to this view, Marx, unlike Engels, was concerned not with trans-historical laws governing the universe but with some particular laws of society. This anti-Engels camp, so to speak, mainly tended to draw bold lines between Marx and Engels, and (...) charged Engels with dis-torting Marxʼs original ideas of dialectics by some kind of reductionism, sci-entism and positivism that might also end up in an obsolete idealism. Engels was „following Hegelʼs mistaken lead“ by extending „the method to apply also to nature“. However, dialectics was „limited ... to the realms of history and society“.2 Some others objected to this view, and characterized any at-tempt to sharply contrast Engels with Marx as concealed mysticism and idealism. For the pro-Engels camp, Engelsʼs conception of nature was „in full conformity“ with Marxʼs materialist philosophy.4 Dialectics of nature was „no invention of Engels“. On the contrary, „it was worked out in collaboration with Marx and had his full agreement. (shrink)

Buddhism has always produced epistemological systems, and those of the Mahāyāna, in particular, always showed knowledge and perception to be inherently delusive. “Higher” forms of Buddhism have a degenerative philosophy of history according to which a sort of Golden Age was disrupted by the rise and gradual development of knowledge and the delusion inherent in it, which have reached their apex in our time – the final phase of the “Era of Darkness.” From this standpoint, this paper intends to show (...) science, in which Marcuse saw an inherent instrumental/technological interest, to have been developed by delusion and to have simultaneously furthered the development of delusion, to the point at which they begot the deadly ecological crisis proper to this concluding phase of the Era of Darkness – which reveals as such the delusion at its root, achieving the latter’s empirical reductio ad absurdum and offering us the possibility of eradicating it and thus healing our minds and, hopefully, our world. (shrink)

Marx's comments on Hegel's philosophy have left an ambiguous legacy for Marxism. One pervasive theme, though, is the interpretation of Hegel's idealist philosophy as being shrouded in mysticism. Marx's main contribution, according to this view, was to demystify Hegel's thought through a more materialist dialectical approach. At the same time, however, there have been those who have sought to rupture this Hegel-Marx connection and purge Hegelianism from Marxism altogether. Appropriate and expunge have therefore been the two main responses to Hegel's (...) influence on Marxism. I will argue against these traditions, however, to assert a more direct relationship between Hegel's and Marx's dialectic. To do so, I want to identify some of the main Marxist thinkers that can be linked with the two main schools above. I will term these the Hegelian-Marxist Materialist Appropriators and the Idealist Expungers. In contrast I put forward the Hegelian-Marxist Materialist school which states that ultimately the dialectic of Hegel is the dialectic of Marx. Before this, I begin by considering some examples of Marx's critique of Hegel. The leitmotif of this critique is a depiction of Hegel's dialectic as mystical or idealistic in contrast to Marx's more materialist dialectic. As we shall see, such a criticism was begun by Marx, perpetuated by Engels as ‘orthodox’ Marxism and ultimately accepted even by those who sought to place themselves within an Hegelian-Marxist tradition. (shrink)

Karl Kautsky was one of the most important Marxist thinkers of his age. In this life sketch written in 1924, he outlines his intellectual development and how he came to be such an important Marxist theoretician.

Le philosophe Gerald A. Cohen est décédé le 5 août 2009. Sa contribution s’est d’abord articulée autour de la pensée de Marx. Elle émergea sur la scène intellectuelle en 1978 avec la parution de Karl Marx’s Theory of History : A Defence, qui impulsa la constitution du marxisme analytique. Par la suite, Cohen tendit à se détacher progressivement de la théorie de Marx. Il participa à la discussion sur le concept libertarien de propriété de soi en vue de l’associer à (...) une approche marxiste, avant d’intégrer pleinement le débat normatif autour des problématiques de justice sociale, autour de la Théorie de la justice de John Rawls. Fondée sur la philosophie kantienne, sa critique de la théorie de Rawls lui reproche de ne pas accorder suffisamment d’autonomie aux choix individuels. Le présent article discute la pertinence du voyage intellectuel de Jerry Cohen dans son rapport à l’œuvre de Marx. (shrink)

The ontological and analytical status of Marxian social theory has been a matter of fierce controversy since Marx’s death, both within and without Marxist circles. A particular source of contention has been over whether Marxism should be construed as an objective science of the capitalist mode of production or as an ethico-philosophical critique of bourgeois society. This is paralleled by the dispute over whether Marxism ought to be considered a humanism or a structuralism. This article addresses both sides of this (...) debate. The argument is that, rather than Marx’s own social thought being split into incompatible poles, giving rise to ‘two Marxisms’, it forms a coherent unity. Marx’s social theory is neither humanist philosophy, nor structural science, but is in fact realist science, which synthesizes these apparent antinomies, and thereby transcends both. (shrink)

This paper divides the sophisms and paradoxes put forth by Chinese thinkers of the pre-Qin period of China into six groups: paradoxes of motion and infinity, paradoxes of class membership, semantic paradoxes, epistemic paradoxes, paradoxes of relativization, other logical contradictions. It focuses on the comparison between the Chinese items and the counterparts of ancient Greek and even of contemporary Western philosophy, and concludes that there turn out to be many similar elements of philosophy and logic at the beginnings of Chinese (...) and Greek civilizations. (shrink)

This article attempts to assess Mario Bunge’s important but widely neglected criticisms of dialectics. It begins by providing a contextualized interpretation of Friedrich Engels’s metaphysics of the dialectics of nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of Leon Trotsky’s and contemporary “dialectical” scientists’ views on materialist dialectics. It argues that while some of Bunge’s criticisms are eminently sensible, the principles underlying the works of dialectical scientists are compatible with Bunge’s emergentist and systemic approach and can shed light on such issues (...) as the levels of organization, the diachronic and synchronic aspects of emergence, and the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma. This article also submits that dialectics is best interpreted as a guideline for a philosophy of change instead of a magical wand that liberates the investigator from study of facts. Understood as something that serves heuristic purposes, dialectics can be sensibly utilized by scientists to shore up or refine their methodological principles and thereby to facilitate empirical research. (shrink)

In a recent article, ?Marxism and Radical Democracy?,1 Femia argues that Marxism is incompatible with radical democracy. In so doing he specifically reiterates2 a now common claim that the notion of scientific socialism defended by Marx and Engels and prevalent in the Second International is anti?democratic. This claim has not only been made by critics of Marxism.3 It has been a major criticism of classical Marxism within the Western Marxist tradition, in particular? in the work of the Frankfurt School.4 It (...) is one of the main reasons why the classical Marxism of Engels and the Second International has been rejected as positivist and vulgar: no modern sophisticated Marxist admits to either positivism or vulgarity. In this paper I examine and reject Femia's arguments for the claim that the notion of scientific socialism is undemocratic. I argue that the orthodox view of Marxism as a scientific theory is compatible with democracy, and indeed encourages a democratic understanding of socialism. A thoroughly vulgar Marxism is thoroughly democratic. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to ground the notion of cyberethics of co-operation. The evolution of modern society has resulted in a shift from industrial society towards informational capitalism. This transformation is a multidimensional shift that affects all aspects of society. Hence also the ethical system of society is penetrated by the emergence of the knowledge society and ethical guidelines for the information age are needed. Ethical issues and conflicts in the knowledge society are connected to topics of ecological (...) and social sustainability. For information ethics and cyberethics, the sustainable design of society, social, and socio-technological systems is important. In this context the notions of sustainability and co-operation are discussed. Based on these categories, the approach of cyberethics of co-operation can be theoretically grounded. (shrink)

According to Sir Karl Popper, there is a harmful approach to the social sciences called 'historicism'. This takes their principal aim to be historical prediction of an unconditional sort and the chief means to this the discovery of laws of historical development. The chief exemplar is held to be Marx. This paper distinguishes two possible sorts of laws of historical development. Popper's arguments against each are rejected. Which sort it is most plausible to ascribe to Marx is considered. Four models (...) of historical determinism are distinguished and the question of Marx's view or views on the question is discussed in terms of them. (shrink)

This article treats Stalin's contributions todialectical and historical materialism. It argues that the latterfound his theses of the `enormous' role of ideas, and of theexistence of social phenomena that do not belong either to thebasis or to the superstructure, in Georgij Plekhanov's `monism'.Nevertheless, Stalin did add some new points of his own.Furthermore, his adopting Plekhanov's monism also helps usunderstand the apparent contradiction between Stalin's emphasison non-economic and non-class factors in human history and hisrejection of `idealist' rudiments in dialectics.

The question of truth is central to current discussions in both of the major contemporary styles of philosophizing. In the Anglo-American linguistic and empiricist tradition there is a lively response (some might say backlash) to apparent difficulties caused by recent recognition of theory change and meaning variance in science. And within the Continental hermeneutio tradition there is raised the central question of the truth status of interpretations in the cultural sciences where these appear not to be subject to the criteria (...) of empirical science. Let me say straight away that I believe that the almost universal dependence on versions of the correspondence theory of truth among analytical philosophers will prove seriously inadequate to both forms of the epistemological problem, and that we have to face here a deep challenge to many entrenched assumptions of empiricism — assumptions that are too infrequently brought to the light of day in these discussions.2. (shrink)

Within the current resurgence of interest in E.V. Ilyenkov, the influence of Engels on Ilyenkov’s work is either overlooked or denied, making Ilyenkov seem closer to Western Marxism than he actually is. In this paper, by considering Engels’s place in his philosophy, I show that Ilyenkov’s approach is fundamentally hostile to many of Western Marxism’s main views. Ilyenkov, like Engels, conceives philosophy as Logic and affirms the ‘alliance’ between philosophy and the natural sciences against speculative metaphysics. In this regard, he (...) develops an original cosmological hypothesis based on Engels’s insights on the hierarchy of matter’s forms of movement and provides a remarkable account of the ideal as an attribute of nature that reproduces its concrete universality through social labour, the active transformation of nature’s phenomena into objects stamped with the seal of our subjectivity. (shrink)

The contributions to Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World reflect upon the problems implied in the received notions of philosophy in the respective scholarly literatures. They ask whether, and for what reasons, a text should be categorized as a philosophical text (or excluded from the canon of philosophy), and what this means for the concept of philosophy. The focus on texts and textual corpora is central because it makes authors expose their claims and arguments in direct relation (...) to specific sources, and discourages generalized reflections on the characteristics of, for example, Japanese culture or the Indian mind. The volume demonstrates that close and historically informed readings are the sine qua non in discussing what philosophy is in Asia and the Islamic world, just as much as with regard to Western literature Contributors are Yoko Arisaka, Wolfgang Behr, Thomas Fröhlich, Lisa Indraccolo, Paulus Kaufmann, Iso Kern, Ralf Müller, Gregor Paul, Lisa Raphals, Fabian Schäfer, Ori Sela, Rafael Suter, Christian Uhl, Viatcheslav Vetrov, Yvonne Schulz Zinda, and Nicholas Zufferey. (shrink)

El artículo analiza el “concepto dialéctica” como método, como realidad, como ciencia del movimiento, como multilateralidad de relaciones, como retroalimentación negativa de totalidades o de sistema, etc.; reflexiona acerca de las leyes de la dialéctica y establece relaciones con diferentes aspectos de la realidad social, política, educativa, comunicativa, etc. Explica cómo la dialéctica puede contribuir para el desarrollo del pensamiento.

We lay the foundations for a critical human ecology that combines the strengths of the biophysical human ecology tradition in environmental sociology with those of historical materialism. We show the strengths of a critically informed human ecology by addressing four key meta-theoretical issues: materialist versus idealist approaches in the social sciences, dialectical versus reductionist analyses, the respective importance of historical and ahistorical causal explanations, and the difference between structural and functional interpretations of phenomena. CHE breaks with the idealism of Western (...) Marxism, which dominated academic neo-Marxist thought in the latter half of the 20th century, and advocates instead the pursuit of a materialist, scientific methodology in dialectical perspective for the explanation of social and ecological change. In turn, this project also involves a critique of the ahistorical and functionalist tendencies of traditional human ecology, while sharing human ecology 's basic starting point: the ecological embeddedness of human societies. (shrink)

The paper concerns time, change and contradiction, and is in three parts. The first is an analysis of the problem of the instant of change. It is argued that some changes are such that at the instant of change the system is in both the prior and the posterior state. In particular there are some changes from p being true to p being true where a contradiction is realized. The second part of the paper specifies a formal logic which accommodates (...) this possibility. It is a tense logic based on an underlying paraconsistent prepositional logic, the logic of paradox. (See the author's article of the same name Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979).) Soundness and completeness are established, the latter by the canonical model construction, and extensions of the basic system briefly considered. The final part of the paper discusses Leibniz's principle of continuity: Whatever holds up to the limit holds at the limit. It argues that in the context of physical changes this is a very plausible principle. When it is built into the logic of the previous part, it allows a rigorous proof that change entails contradictions. Finally the relation of this to remarks on dialectics by Hegel and Engels is briefly discussed. (shrink)

“The political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.” With these words, Marx described the Paris Commune of 1871. It “was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short term […] a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.” The political tradition of the Commune was inherited by the Russian soviets and inspired Lenin, who explained (...) the role of those governing bodies as a “reversion to primitive democracy.” Arthur Rosenberg, professor of Ancient History at Berlin University, tried in his book Democracy and Class Struggle in the Ancient World to offer historical ground for the ideas developed by Lenin in State and Revolution and compared ancient Athenian democracy to the contemporary German and Russian councils. During the 1920s, as a communist leader and MP, Rosenberg, recalling his ideas on Athenian democracy, criticized the political degeneration of the Russian workers’ State. He stressed how Soviet Russia, in limiting the power of the councils, had suppressed the governing body of socialist direct democracy. In his work Workers’ Councils, Dutch revolutionary Anton Pannekoek renewed Rosenberg’s criticism at the end of World War II, returning to the image of ancient democratic Athens as a forerunner of the socialist councils. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to articulate a conception of emancipation for the Anthropocene. First, the Kantian roots of emancipation understood as the capacity of rational beings to act according to self-chosen ends are explained. It is shown that this conception of emancipation sets the realm of autonomous beings humans over the realm of heteronomous beings. Accounts of the ‘humanisation of nature’ are analysed as incomplete attempts to overcome this dualism. It is argued that the root of this incompleteness (...) lies in the application of analytical rather than dialectical reason to the human–nature interaction. The Anthropocene is presented as the geological–historical moment when at the same time as nature is being humanised, humans are being made aware of themselves as animal. This gives way to a conception of Anthropocene emancipation which will be described in a fourth section. The article concludes with reflections on COVID-19 as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ and as an opportunity reflexively, and at unprecedented scale, to internalise our heteronomy and to live an emancipation fit for a terraforming species. (shrink)

A well-worn French proverb pronounces ‘tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner’ (‘to understand all is to forgive all’). Is forgiveness the inevitable consequence of social scientific understanding of the actions and lives of perpetrators of serious wrongdoing? Do social scientific explanations provide excuses or justifications for the perpetrators of the actions that the explanations purport to explain? In this essay, I seek clarification of these intertwined explanatory and moral questions.

Se analiza la influencia del pensamiento de Marx en la formulación temprana de la teoría habermasiana. Para ello, se parte de las críticas de Albrecht Wellmer y Jürgen Habermas a la autocomprensión marxiana del materialismo histórico. Luego se estudia la reconstrucción de algunos postulados del marxismo llevada a cabo por Habermas en términos de una renovada teoría de la evolución social. Con ello salen a la luz algunos supuestos básicos de la teoría de Marx que aparecen trasformados en la conceptualización (...) de Habermas y que constituyen una base ineludible para comprender el posterior pensamiento de este autor. (shrink)

This article attempts to assess Mario Bunge’s important but widely neglected criticisms of dialectics. It begins by providing a contextualized interpretation of Friedrich Engels’s metaphysics of the dialectics of nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of Leon Trotsky’s and contemporary “dialectical” scientists’ views on materialist dialectics. It argues that while some of Bunge’s criticisms are eminently sensible, the principles underlying the works of dialectical scientists are compatible with Bunge’s emergentist and systemic approach and can shed light on such issues (...) as the levels of organization, the diachronic and synchronic aspects of emergence, and the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma. This article also submits that dialectics is best interpreted as a guideline for a philosophy of change instead of a magical wand that liberates the investigator from study of facts. Understood as something that serves heuristic purposes, dialectics can be sensibly utilized by scientists to shore up or refine their methodological principles and thereby to facilitate empirical research. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1:*{behavior:url } This part of the Soviet philosophy that corresponds approximately to theoretical philosophy and philosophy of science on the example of Estonia and proceeding from the University of Tartu is discussed. The author concentrates on the period of approximately 1960–1990, when he himself was engaged in the field, i.e. the time before 1960 is not included. The aim of this paper is not to provide an overview of the individual philosophers in Estonia (...) at the time and their works, but to give a more general description of the philosophy of the Soviet era. The Soviet and the East European philosophy of the time have received rather little critical treatment in literature in English. However, a few general overviews trying to prove that this Soviet and East European philosophical legacy is worth studying have still been published. This paper is focused on the question what kind of philosophical researches it was possible to engage oneself in under the abnormal conditions at the time and whether some starting points and problem issues in theseresearches might be viable also today. Estonian experience confirms the general conclusion of these authors who, analyzing the legacy of Marxism, have found that although Marxism is nowadays—not to mention how it existed in the Soviet totalitarian regime—mainly not considered a serious philosophy but rather an ideological basis of a failed political doctrine, it has nevertheless quite something to offer when treated in a more depoliticized manner, in the general context of philosophical quests. Teoreetiline ja teadusfilosoofia Nõukogude ajal: mõned märkused Eesti näitel 1960-1990 Vaatluse all on Eesti näitel ja lähtudes Tartu ülikoolist see osa Nõukogudeaegsest filosoofiast, mis vastab umbes teoreetilisele filosoofiale ja teadusfilosoofiale. Autor peatub ajavahemikul umbes 1960–1990, mil ta ka ise tegev oli, st 1960-ndate aastate eelset aega ei käsitleta. Artikli eesmärgiks ei ole ülevaate andmine Eestis sel ajal tegutsenud filosoofidest ja nende töödest, vaid Nõukogudeaegse filosoofia üldisem iseloomustamine. Nõukogude ja selleagset Ida-Euroopa filosoofiat on ingliskeelses kirjanduses üsna vähe kriitiliselt uuritud. Üksikuid ülevaateteoseid, milles on püütud näidata, etsee Nõukogude ja Ida-Euroopa filosoofiline pärand väärib uurimist, on siiski ilmunud. Käesolevas artiklis on keskendutud eelkõige küsimusele, mis laadi filosoofilise uurimistööga sai tolle aja ebanormaalsetes tingimustes tegelda ja kas mõned lähtekohad ja probleemipüstitused selles on elujõulised ka veel nüüd. Eesti kogemus kinnitab nende autorite üldist järeldust, kes marksismi pärandit uurides on leidnud, et kuigi marksismi tänapäeval — rääkimata sellest, missugune see oli Nõukogude totalitaarses režiimis — enamasti ei peeta tõsiseltvõetavaks filosoofiaks, vaid pigem läbikukkunud poliitilise õpetuse ideoloogiliseks aluseks, on tal siiski nii mõndagi öelda, kui teda käsitleda depolitiseeritumalt, filosoofiliste otsingute üldises kontekstis. Märksõnad: dialektiline materialism, dialektika, ‘eessõna-marksism’, filosoofia põhiküsimus, Nõukogude filosoofia, ‘ontologistid’ ja ‘epistemologistid’, praktika. (shrink)

(1991). Ideas of cooperation and struggle in the Chinese philosophy, and its worldwide significance. World Futures: Vol. 31, Cooperation: Toward a Post-Modern Ethic, pp. 181-190.

Marx believed that what most clearly distinguished him and Engels from the nineteenth-century French socialists was that their version of socialism was “scientific” while the latters' was Utopian. What he intended by this contrast is roughly the following: French socialists such as Proudhon and Fourier constructed elaborate visions of a future socialist society without an adequate understanding of existing capitalist society. For Marx, on the other hand, socialism was not an idea or an ideal to be realized, but a natural (...) outgrowth of the existing capitalist order. Marx's historical materialism is a systematic attempt to discover the laws governing the inner dynamics of capitalism and class societies generally. Although this theory issues in a prediction of the ultimate triumph of socialism, it is a commonplace that Marx had little to say about the details of post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, some of its features can be discerned from his critical analysis of capitalism and what its replacement entails. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between the classical Marxist tradition and the conceptual roots of totalitarianism. Here totalitarianism is understood to entail the attempt to frame the developmental impulses of modernity within the logic of a premodern political imaginary—defined as internally homogenous and transparent to itself. In the first part, we take issue with those who try to distinguish between the thought of Marx and Engels, and who insist that it is only in Engels's thought that the traces of a (...) totalitarian politics might be found. In the second section, we outline briefly the context within which Marx's thought was developed, after which we argue that Marx's vision of communism is dependent on the three-phase vision of historical process which he inherited from Hegel. Without denying the historical peculiarities of the imposition of communism in Russia, we conclude that it is out of this latter vision of history that the conceptual roots of totalitarianism must be located. (shrink)

Intense interest has long been shown in the nature of humankind. Are we the products of genes? Are we the products of culture? Or are we something in between? The Marxist position, stressing the dominant significance of social methods for studying humans, is sketched. Then, a number of Western, biologically influenced views are discussed and criticised. Although there are important insights in the writings of the holders of these views, ultimately they produce only a semiscience.

We discuss a number of fundamental aspects of modern cosmological concepts, from the phenomenological, observational, theoretical and epistemic points of view. We argue that the modern cosmology, despite a great advent, in particular in the observational sector, is yet to solve important problems, posed already by the classical times. In particular the stress is put on discerning the scientific features of modern cosmological paradigms from the more speculative ones, with the latter immersed in some aspects deeply into mythological world picture. (...) We finally discuss the principal paradigms, which are present in the modern cosmological studies and evaluate their epistemic merits. (shrink)

Within the planning discourse two poles have materialised over the last decades: a participatory ideal guided by substantive rationality, opposed to an algorithmic governmentality subordinated to instrumental reason. This rift within socialist thought is also observable when it comes to the discovery of needs. The paper understands this discovery procedure primarily as a forecasting problem and demonstrates how many authors dedicated to a participatory planning process call for consumers to write down their desires in the form of wish lists. As (...) a response to this epistemically questionable discovery procedure, the state of the art in capitalist demand-forecasting at enterprises like Amazon is presented, where machine-learning algorithms excel at modelling interrelated time series on a global level by extrapolating demand patterns in real-time. The paper closes with a proposal to reconfigure this predictive apparatus for socialist ends and raises questions concerned with the political implications of centralising decision-making in black-box algorithms. (shrink)

La obra de Marx ha suscitado una añeja polémica entre sus estudiosos. Algunos han mantenido que el lenguaje desarrollado en ella es estrictamente explicativo. Dicho lenguaje expresaría ante todo un saber científico expurgado de todo contenido moral. En el otro extremo, en cambio, otros han argüido que en Marx hallamos más bien un lenguaje ético orientado a denunciar los crímenes y miserias de una determinada formación social con el n de oponerle otra. En este artículo defiendo la idea de que (...) en la obra de Marx hay elementos tanto para afirmar una cosa como la otra. Sin embargo, argumento que la actualidad del pensamiento marxista reside esencialmente en los elementos éticos y normativos que configuran la dimensión moral de su planteamiento. (shrink)