Can Marxist-Leninist philosophy disregard dialectical materialism, the analysis of material and social contradictions, the need to overcome and resolve them in the service of revolutionary transformation? ‘Does the lecturer acknowledge that the philosophy of Marxism is dialectical materialism’, as Lenin asked Bogdanov one day in May 1908? What had 'official Soviet Marxism' really become, capable of combining ideological dictatorship with militant philosophical ignorance, in turn justified by the achievements of modern science, skilfully used as an instrument of domination and preservation (...) of the established order? How can one conceptually dominate reality and its contradictions, knowing well that knowledge is never neutral but is class-based? These questions are answered by Evald Ilyenkov, one of the greatest Marxist philosophers of the 20th century, re-examining Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism at the end of the 1970s with a text entitled Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism, still unpublished in Italy, and identifying in the revolutionary leader an exceptional theoretical ally. Just as Lenin had had to fight the attacks promoted by the theories of Bogdanov, who approached the empirio-criticism of Mach, Avenarius and Berman, seeing it as dogmatic and reactionary materialism directed against the natural sciences, so Ilyenkov fought against the penetration of positivism into Soviet politics and philosophy, criticizing the rejection of the dialectic only functional to the technocratic project of building 'socialism' in the Brezhnev era, a disguised heir of the empirio-criticism denounced by Lenin as the natural metaphysical conclusion to the logic of positivism. (shrink)

What does a Marxist theory of human psychology look like? Kyrill Potapov sheds light on this topic by showing how the works of Soviet thinkers like Lev Vygotsky and Evald Ilyenkov relate to more modern research on collective intentionality and niche construction.

There is a simple, intuitive theory of the semantic reference of proper names that has been unjustly neglected. This is the view that semantic reference is conventionalized speakers reference, i.e. the view that a name semantically refers to an object if, and only if, there exists a convention to use the name to speaker-refer to that object. The theory can be found in works dealing primarily with other issues (e.g. Stine in Philos Stud 33:319–337, 1977; Schiffer in Erkenntnis 13:171–206, (...) 1978; Sainsbury in Erkenntnis 80:195–214, 2015; Sainsbury, Thinking about things, Oxford University Press, 2018), yet these authors provide no sustained discussion of it. Devitt (Designation, Columbia University Press, 1981) did formulate a view on which semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference, yet his views are assimilated to causalist views. This is a mistake. While the conventionalized speaker’s reference view captures much of what is plausible in descriptivism and causalism, it remains distinct from both. (shrink)