Pony Central

Post: #301

(2nd February 2013 01:31 PM)M14Brony Wrote:  I am currently reading:

Anti-Dühring by Friedrich Engels (I got sidetracked for awhile, but I have started again with this book).
Christianity Unveilied by Baron d'Holbach.

I also read a portion of Fundamentals of HVACR by Carter Stanfield and David Skaves for a college course, and I will most likely be returning to this book for future classes.

That book is representative of everything bad in Marxism, IMO. Engels' philosophical writings were (as an academic philosopher) complete crap. He should've stuck with political theory, which is what he was good at.

Holbach, on the other hand, is fantastic.

Post: #302

(2nd February 2013 07:00 PM)Philo Wrote:  That book is representative of everything bad in Marxism, IMO. Engels' philosophical writings were (as an academic philosopher) complete crap. He should've stuck with political theory, which is what he was good at.

Holbach, on the other hand, is fantastic.

If a work by Engels explaining Marxist basics, albeit in a polemical form, is "crap," what do we call the works of many of the people claiming to be Marxists today? Some of these people are so-called academic Marxists, who wouldn't be caught dead outside of their studies and internet discussion boards (you won't ever see such people on a picket line, you won't see them trying to organize a workplace, you won't see them at public discussions, etc.). Some of these people are reformists masquerading as "socialists". Sometimes we see pseudo-intellectual twaddle (take Postmodernism as a great example) being passed off as some sort of "Marxism".

IMO, a good deal of the flak Marxism gets is, amusingly, representative of everything bad about the left today.

I am still thinking of what to read next.

Agree x1 (list)

Post: #303

(7th February 2013 07:52 AM)M14Brony Wrote:  If a work by Engels explaining Marxist basics, albeit in a polemical form, is "crap," what do we call the works of many of the people claiming to be Marxists today? Some of these people are so-called academic Marxists, who wouldn't be caught dead outside of their studies and internet discussion boards (you won't ever see such people on a picket line, you won't see them trying to organize a workplace, you won't see them at public discussions, etc.). Some of these people are reformists masquerading as "socialists". Sometimes we see pseudo-intellectual twaddle (take Postmodernism as a great example) being passed off as some sort of "Marxism".

IMO, a good deal of the flak Marxism gets is, amusingly, representative of everything bad about the left today.

I am still thinking of what to read next.

I don't disagree about "academic Marxism," it's mainly the philosophical aspects of AD that are problematic, and when I say "everything wrong with Marxism," I don't mean that Marxism in general is bad, but I mean the fourth-rate philosophy gives us a bad name. Intellectually speaking there is nothing of merit in AD that isn't said in something like the Communist Manifesto or Marx's Preface to a Critique of Political Economy.

My problem with Anti-Duhring, and Engels' philosophical ventures in general, is that they saddle us with fourth-rate philosophy we don't need, just like I think Lenin was a brilliant political theorist and organizer, but his writings on philosophy (like Materialism and Empirio-criticism) are absurd junk that makes Christian apologetics look good. Same goes for most so-called "academic Marxists," it's fourth rate philosophy, and as you rightly point out, unlike AD it's unintelligible to boot! I think everything of actual merit in AD can be (and has been) condensed to parts II and III of "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific."

To me, what is of enormous value in Marxism is:

1. Its rigorous historiography (historical materialism)
2. Its social theory (such as the theory of ideology)
3. It's analysis of capitalism
4. Certain versions of its political program

And we're holding ourselves back intellectually by hanging on to the crappy philosophy (mostly due to Engels, but Marx also had some in his earlier ventures), just like the left more broadly is holding itself back by clinging to obscurantist, confused stuff like postmodernism and academic Marxism.

Coming as a student of philosophy who would like to be a professor of that subject, I think Marxism would benefit by being coupled with the best method of philosophy we have so far, that avoids the bullshit that occurred through much of history (especially the Middle Ages) - 20th Century Analytic philosophy. I'm thinking, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Putnam, Grice, Strawson, Davidson, Sellars, Malcolm, Carnap, Lewis, Dennett, Chomsky, etc., many of whom were/are socialists themselves (Chomsky, Russell, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Sellars, and Carnap right off the top of my head).

Post: #304

(7th February 2013 04:37 PM)Philo Wrote:  I don't disagree about "academic Marxism," it's mainly the philosophical aspects of AD that are problematic, and when I say "everything wrong with Marxism," I don't mean that Marxism in general is bad, but I mean the fourth-rate philosophy gives us a bad name. Intellectually speaking there is nothing of merit in AD that isn't said in something like the Communist Manifesto or Marx's Preface to a Critique of Political Economy.

My problem with Anti-Duhring, and Engels' philosophical ventures in general, is that they saddle us with fourth-rate philosophy we don't need, just like I think Lenin was a brilliant political theorist and organizer, but his writings on philosophy (like Materialism and Empirio-criticism) are absurd junk that makes Christian apologetics look good. Same goes for most so-called "academic Marxists," it's fourth rate philosophy, and as you rightly point out, unlike AD it's unintelligible to boot! I think everything of actual merit in AD can be (and has been) condensed to parts II and III of "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific."

To me, what is of enormous value in Marxism is:

1. Its rigorous historiography (historical materialism)
2. Its social theory (such as the theory of ideology)
3. It's analysis of capitalism
4. Certain versions of its political program

And we're holding ourselves back intellectually by hanging on to the crappy philosophy (mostly due to Engels, but Marx also had some in his earlier ventures), just like the left more broadly is holding itself back by clinging to obscurantist, confused stuff like postmodernism and academic Marxism.

Coming as a student of philosophy who would like to be a professor of that subject, I think Marxism would benefit by being coupled with the best method of philosophy we have so far, that avoids the bullshit that occurred through much of history (especially the Middle Ages) - 20th Century Analytic philosophy. I'm thinking, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Putnam, Grice, Strawson, Davidson, Sellars, Malcolm, Carnap, Lewis, Dennett, Chomsky, etc., many of whom were/are socialists themselves (Chomsky, Russell, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Sellars, and Carnap right off the top of my head).

Hitherto, I hand't encountered "Rosa Lichtenstein" for years, and for some time, I was thinking that I would never encounter her again unless I specifically looked for her...

Post: #305

(8th February 2013 07:33 AM)M14Brony Wrote:  Hitherto, I hand't encountered "Rosa Lichtenstein" for years, and for some time, I was thinking that I would never encounter her again unless I specifically looked for her...

She can be pedantic and crank-y (not "cranky," a crank as in she has some odd ideas about mathematics, she rejects Cantor's diagonal argument for some reason), but she is very good at philosophy, and I think she has the right idea in rejecting so-called "Marxist philosophy," which is laughable in philosophical circles, and I see no reason to believe she is basically wrong. Her arguments are well-constructed and well-documented.

There are things I disagree with her about, namely regarding Marx interpretation. She thinks, most importantly, that

1. The mature Marx definitely and completely broke with Hegel
2. There was a radical break between the thought of Marx and Engels

I'm skeptical of both these claims, but I don't see it as particularly relevant, as I'm perfectly willing to except that inasmuch as Marx did agree with Hegel, it was to his detriment. We've known Hegel was a joke since Schopenhauer's critiques in The World as Will and Representation among other places, some people just never got the memo.

One does not have to agree with Rosa's specific views (a therapeutic, anti-philosophical reading of Wittgenstein), there are many mainstream analytic philosophies that gel nicely with Marxism. The nonreductive naturalism of people like Wilfrid Sellars, W.V. Quine, John Dupre, Elliot Sober, Philip Kitcher, etc., Neo-Kantianism (Schopenhauer, CHabermas, Allen Wood, Christopher Janaway, Christine Korsgaard, Michael Friedman, Robert Paul Wolff, etc.), pragmatism (John Dewey, C.S. Peirce, William James, Robert Brandom, Sidney Hook, Huw Price, Susan Haack, etc.).

There are many good Marxist theorists (or I should better call them philosophers-who-happen-to-be-Marxists) who find this approach fruitful, who are not what you and I would derogatorily refer to as "academic Marxists." I agree that we don't need to waste our time on people like Slavoj Zizek, Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Louis Althusser, etc. But there are real, rigorous, non-obscurantist philosophers who do a lot of good work and are Marxists, or at least Marxist-sympathetic socialists.

Wilfrid Sellars, who is unfortunately no longer with us, was a committed socialist, as was his father, the well-known pragmatist philosopher R.W. Sellars. His philosophy was a form of anti-foundationalist naturalism which drew heavily on Hegel and Kant. His "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is classic and is actually good for further developing the Marxist account of ideology.

Sidney Hook, the pragmatist, was also a Marxist, as he saw pragmatism and Marxism as committed to the same opposition to traditional philosophy, analyzing actual social practices, and on refusing a strict separation of theoretical and political/social realms. This was true of all the pragmatists (such as Richard Rorty and the IMO best current pragmatists, Huw Price and Robert Brandom).

Raymond Geuss is one of the best analytic political thinkers today, who has criticized the foundations of idealistic political philosophy (liberalism and american libertarianism as forwarded by John Rawls and Robert Nozick respectively) from a historicist, Marxist perspective, in books like Philosophy and Real Politics.

Jonathan Wolff, the eminent political theorist, has written an excellent book on Marx called Why Read Marx Today?

Allen Wood (not Alan Woods, who is a hack with the exception of Marxism and the USA, which I thought was quite good) has written probably the best single-author book on Marx in general (Karl Marx) which is especially good at analyzing what role value-thinking (what would traditionally be called ethics) plays in Marx's thought and to what extent he successfully breaks from the sorts of philosophical views he wanted to repudiate.

I could go on, but all of the following analytic philosophers were/are either sympathetic to Marx or are outright Marxists, and none of these are the sorts of obscurantist literary-theory types we rightly reject!

Ludwig Wittgenstein
C.J. Arthur
Wilfrid Sellars
R.W. Sellars
Sidney Hook
Terrell Carver
G.A. Cohen
Jon Elster
Norman Geras
Eugene Kamenka
David McLellen
Raymond Geuss
Brian Leiter
Michael Rosen
Allen Wood
Robert Paul Wolf
Jonathan Wolff
Elliot Sober
Donald Davidson
Peter Singer
John Roemer

And that's not to mention non-Marxist socialists like Noam Chomsky.

But to return to where we began, I could be called a partisan of Rosa's, simply because I can't see anything actually wrong with her views that aren't arguments from consequences ("oh, that would be disagreeing with important Marxist x") which is the kind of apologetics that Christians, not scientific socialists, engage in.

Post: #306

I am currently reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

Post: #307

Over Heaven by Nisio Isin.

Post: #308

Currently reading "A Short History of Canada" by Desmond Morton. Sounds like your standard history buff stuff right? While that is true, Morton also has a nice habit of cleaning up a lot of historical dogma and half-truths when it comes to my nations history.

Post: #309

Rich People Things - Chris Lehmann. Funny cultural criticism that is also informative.
A Queer History of the United States - Michael Bronski.

Post: #310

Currently finishing up Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.

Post: #311

I just finished the Hunger Games. Waiting a bit before I read the second book.

Post: #312

Still A Queer History of the United States - Michael Bronski
Analytic vs. Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy - James Chase and Jack Reynolds
The Postmodern Turn - Steven Best and Douglas Kellner

Post: #313

The Earthsea Quartet, I'm currently onto the fourth book!

Post: #314

From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll. Excellent physics book; Sean Carroll is one of the brightest and most insightful of the new generation of theoretical physicists. This book is a philosophically sensitive and scientifically rigorous proposal for a theory of time.

I'm only part-way through, but his general idea is that our universe is not time-symmetric; the second law of thermodynamics is a genuine emergent property. However, he places this in the context of a landscape multiverse theory of which the observable universe is just a part, and the landscape (it's not crucial to Carroll's proposal whether this is the landscape of superstring theorists or of alternative quantum gravity proposals like loop quantum gravity or spinfoam cosmology) has no upper bound on its entropy. The low-entropy state characteristic of the early universe is just a local feature of the multiverse landscape.

It's a particularly appealing proposal precisely because it is largely independent of which particular theory of quantum gravity is the correct one, although some of the details of Carroll's proposal rest on the idea that our universe's geometry forms an anti-De Sitter space, which is not a completely uncontroversial assumption.

I also just finished How To Read Wittgenstein by Ray Monk. I have to say, not a terrible introductory work, though Anthony Kenny's Wittgenstein is still much better.

Next I'm planning on starting a popular philosophy book called Answers for Aristotle by Massimo Pigliucci, and a book by Lederman and Hill on symmetries in physics.

Post: #315

I am getting started on Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky.

Post: #316

(17th April 2013 06:57 AM)M14Brony Wrote:  I am getting started on Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky.

That's a good piece, some of Trotsky's best prose.

Post: #317

I am currently reading Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt.

Post: #318

just got done re reading the Blinding Knife, the second book of the Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks, a fun read

Post: #319

Reading "Enders Game" and "Horus Rising".

Im over 200 pages into horus rising and i have no idea whats going on still

Post: #320

I'm doing a lot of reading on

1. The physics of time and
2. The relationship between science and philosophy

right now. So for the first one I'm reading Lee Smolin's new book Time Reborn and re-reading Hans Reichenbach's The Direction of Time. In the second respect, I'm finishing up a new volume from Oxford University Press called Scientific Metaphysics, which takes up an aggressively "scientistic" stance. It has essays by James Ladyman and Don Ross, Daniel Dennett, Michael Friedman, and others. I'm looking for what to read next on this matter, I might go back to some of Einstein's works for inspiration.

Post: #321

"thinkers and Ideas"

By Torstein Tollefsen

Post: #322

Vernor Vinge - A Deepness In The Sky
Jared Diamond - Collapse

Post: #323

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Think Alice in Wonderland if it took place in the modern-day London Underground. Kind of confusing, but still really good.

Post: #324

Reading Atlas Shrugged. People seem to get really angry and tell me to stop reading it when I mention it. It's a fairy tale which people take way too seriously.