Download or read book The Soviet Critique of Neopositivism written by W.F. Boeselager and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nrst of the people to be thanked for their help during the composition of this work is Professor I.M. Bochenski, under whom I had the good fortune to study for an extended period of time. Without his help, it is doubtful that this work would have been writt"l1 at all. Among the other professors who helped along the way, I would like to cite in particular Professors A.F. Utz, M.D. Philippe and N. Luyten of the University of Fribourg. Many friends were present at the birth of the ideas contained in this book. By naming K.G. Ballestrem, T.l. Blakeley and M.F. Gagern, I do not want to slight any of the rest. It was A. Spiekermann in Hollinghofen who saw to it that other preoccupations did not rob me of all the time needed for the study of the subject-matter and to the composition of this treatise. Of particular help in getting sources from the libraries of the world were Miss Lifschitz of the Institute of East-European Studies and Mr. Uldry of the Cantonal Library in Fribourg, Switzerland. Finally, my patient typist, Mrs. Frey in Munster, deserves special mention for her beautiful work.
Download or read book Marxist Ethical Theory in the Soviet Union written by P.T. Grier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the intellectual history of Marxism through its several phases and various national adaptations suggests, for any of at least three reasons, that the attempt to provide a widely acceptable summary of 'Marxist ethics' must be an enterprise with little prospect of success. First, a number of prominent Marxists have insisted that Marxism can have no ethics because its status as a science precludes bias toward, or the assumption of, any particular ethical standpoint. On this view it would be no more reasonable to expect an ethics of Marxism than of any other form of social science. Second, basing themselves on the opposite assumption, an equally prominent assortment of Marxist intellectuals have lamented the absence of a coherently developed Maryist ethics as a deficiency which must be remedied. ! Third, less com monly, Marxism is sometimes alleged to possess no developed ethical theory because it is exclusively committed to advocacy of class egoism on behalf 2 of the proletariat, and is thus rooted in a prudential, not a moral standpoint. The advocacy of proletarian class egoism - or 'revolutionary morality- may, strictly speaking, constitute an ethical standpoint, but it might be regarded as a peculiar waste of time for a convinced and consistent class egoist to develop precise formulations of his ethical views for the sake of convincing an abstract audience of classless and impartial rational observers which does not happen to exist at present.
Download or read book Soviet Historiography of Philosophy written by Evert van der Zweerde and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `Scientific history of philosophy' was one of the professional branches of Soviet philosophy, and a place where philosophical culture was preserved in an often hostile environment. Situated between the ideological exigencies of the Soviet system with its Marxist-Leninist `theoretical foundation' and the need for an objective account of philosophy's past, Soviet history of philosophy displays the characteristic features of Soviet philosophy as a whole, including a forceful reappearance of its Hegelian background. This book is the only Western monograph on this important part of Soviet philosophy, thus filling the last main gap in Western `Philosophical Sovietology'. At the same time, it offers the first survey of Soviet philosophy after the disappearance of the Soviet system itself, embarking on an historical and meta-philosophical investigation of Soviet philosophical culture. The book will be of interest to students of Soviet and Russian philosophy, historians of philosophy and specialists in Soviet studies.
Download or read book The Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Aesthetics written by Edward M. Swiderski and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 0. 1. GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEMATIC This study is devoted to an examination of a concept of crucial significance for Soviet aesthetics - the concept of the aesthetic (esteticeskoe). Soviet aestheticians have for some time already been trying to design a concept of the aesthetic that would satisfy, on the one hand, the requirements of aesthe tic phenomena, and, on the other hand, the principles of the Marxist-Leninist world view. The first part of this work shows how the concept of the aesthetic has been and continues to be problematic for Soviet aestheticians. This task is carried out by dwelling, first of all, on the controversies among Soviet aesthe ticians concerning meta-aesthetic issues, viz, the nature and scope of aesthetics as well as its place among other philosophical and non-philosophical disci plines. A particularly clear view of the problems that have traditionally pre occupied Soviet aestheticians is provided by an examination of what they standardly call the 'method of aesthetics', where 'method' is understood in the sense of an explanatory framework rather than in the strict logico-scien tific sense of the term. This discussion will provide the occasion to pass in review the main periods of Soviet aesthetics and the characteristic aspects of each. The chapter on the sources of contemporary Marxist-Leninist aesthetics brings into relief the lack of a homogeneous tradition in the question of the nature of the aesthetic and other related problems.
Download or read book Themes in Soviet Marxist Philosophy written by J.E. Blakeley and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet philosophical scene has experienced remarkable growth since the innovations of the 50's and the renovations of the 60's. This volume of Sovietica is intended by the editors as a finger on the pulse of the Marxist-Leninist corpus philosophicum as we enter the 1970's. Published in the years between 1960 and 1970, the Filosofskaja en ciklopedija (FE) has replaced the Kratkij filosofskij slovar' (Short Philo sophic Dictionary: 1939, 1941, 1951 and 1954) and the Filosofskij slovar' (Philosophic Dictionary: 1963). It is an impressive work - 2994 pages in five volumes (I, 1960, 504 pp.; II, 1962, 575 pp.; III, 1964, 584 pp.; IV, 1967, 591 pp.; V, 1970, 740 pp.), with the editors and authors representing all the contemporary Soviet philosophers of note. The FE has been extensively reviewed in Kommunist (1972, 5, 119-127) and in Studies in Soviet Thought [beginning with SST 12 (1972) 4]. Restrictions of space have forced us to omit much that was originally to be included. The same limitations have obliged us to deviate from the initial methodological rule which was 'to include only complete, un abridged articles' - in order to avoid distortion by selection. Only two articles have been shortened: only the basic portion of 'science' has been included; we have dropped 'natural science', 'sciences on man and society', and 'classification of sciences' (a total of thirteen pages in Russian) - this last with regret and with apologies to Professor Kedrov.
Download or read book Mao Tse Tung s Theory of Dialectic written by F.Y.K. Soo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 1979 ushered in a new phase in China's long and continuous revolu tion. Currently, this new phase is being symbolically referred to, by the Chinese leaders themselves, as the 'New Long March' (a continuation of the legendary and historical Long March) in terms of modernization, which comprises the Four Modernizations: Agriculture, Industry, Science and Technology, and Military Defense. Such an all-encompassing attempt at modernization may appear, to some at least, to be something new, or may indicate a radical shift in her policy. But upon closer examination, this decision seems only to reflect an historical continuity in terms of the two major long-term goals of the Chinese Revolution: 'national independence' and 'modernization' (or 'industrialization'). The former would make China strong; the latter, wealthy. For, ever since the Opium War in 1840 and throughout the Revolutions of 1911 and 1949, China has always pursued these two revolutionary goals, though with different emphases at different times. This has been especially true during the past three decades as this twofold goal has dictated all of China's important policies, both domestic and foreign. In other words, while the concrete policies may have appeared to be lacking in unity at times, they have been formulated with the specific intent of achieving national independence and modernization. From this perspective, the New Long March marks the passage of post-Mao China beyond the transition of succession toward the continued pursuit of the same revolutionary goals.
Download or read book Genesis and Development of Plekhanov s Theory of Knowledge written by D. Steila and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. One of the most outstanding leaders within Second International Marxism, George Plekhanov has interested Western scholars primarily as a historical and political figure, specifically as the first full-fledged Marxist among the Russian intelligentsia. At the end of the nineteenth century he was the leader in putting Russian progressive culture in touch with Western Marxism, breaking away from Populism and, at the same time, resuming materialistic tradition within Russian progressive thought. Among Russian revolutionaries, a few others to be sure had been interested in Marx before Plekhanov. The translations of some of Marx' works into Russian show this clearly. In 1869 Mikhail Bakunin translated The Communist Manifesto. Three years later Nikolaj Daniel'son, a populist, completed the first foreign-language version of the first book of Marx' Capital and within six months about a thousand copies had been sold. In the middle of the 1870's, an 'academic' economist, N. !. Ziber, helped to spread Marx' economic ideas by teaching them in Kiev and writing articles in the journal Slovo, which to some extent influenced Plekhanov's later choices. But it was Plekhanov who first analyzed the Russian situation as a whole in Marxist terms, thereby earning renown as the "Father of Russian Marxism". 1 His writings became the school for a whole generation of revolutionaries. At the beginning respected and venerated, then rejected and criticized, Plekhanov for long held the leadership of Russian Marxism, as its best-known 'Master'.
Download or read book Soviet Theory of Knowledge written by J.E. Blakeley and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a complete survey of contemporary Soviet theory of knowledge. It is by no means meant to replace De Vries' excellent treatise on the same subject. Since De Vries depended mainly on the 'classics of Marxism' and the few contemporary Soviet works which were available in German translation, his account is at best an in troduction to the contemporary period. In a sense this book is com plementary to his: he presents the doctrines of the classics and criticizes them, this book recounts what came after and what is going on now. Epistemology and theory of knowledge are taken here as equivalent terms, representing the Soviet gnose%gija and teorija poznanija. No attempt to justify the existence of such a philosophical discipline will be attempted here. Even outside of this question of the legitimacy of epistemo logy, it is not easy to delimit the domain of its purvey. We have, therefore, taken it in a wider rather than narrow sense. This means that some ques tions of logic and psychology have been taken up - to the extent that they overlap with the field of philosophical consideration of knowledge.
Download or read book Between Ideology and Utopia written by A. Liebich and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century European intellectual history has given rise to such varied and abundant research that one is surprised to find certain important problems long identified and yet still relatively unexplored. Such is the case for certain aspects of the crucial transition from Hegel to Marx, for minority tendencies among French socialists and for the Messianic phenomenon, national and religious, so central to the period, particularly in Eastern Europe, and so rarely studied in detail. Certainly, these lacunae are exemplified by the absence of any com prehensive work on August Cieszkowski whose overall contribution to the history of the period may be marginal but whose specific role in each of the areas mentioned is both significant in itself and illustrative of certain wider problems. Cieszkowski first achieved recognition as the author of the Pro legomena zur Historiosophie in 1838. This short tract never became popular among the Berlin Hegelians for whom it was intended but it affected a number of radical intellectuals outside their circle. His next work, Gott und Palingenesie, was a defense of personal immortality against Hegelian revisionism. The following year, however, he founded as a bulwark of the Hegelian school the Philosophische Gesellschaft against external critics and internal dissolution.
Download or read book Marxism and Alternatives written by I Rockmore and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary philosophy is by its nature pluralistic, to a perhaps greater extent than at any moment of the preceding tradition, in that there are multiple forms of thought competing for a position on the center of the philosophic stage. The reasons for this conceptual proliferation are numerous. But certainly one factor is the increasing development of contemporary means of publication and communication, which in turn make possible the rapid dissemination of ideas as well as an informed reaction to them. And this in turn has increased the possibility for serious philosophic exchange by enhancing the available opportunities for the interaction of competing forms of thought. But, although informed philosophic interaction has in principle become increasingly possible in recent years, the frequency, scope and quality of such discussion has often been less than satisfactory. Contemporary philosophic viewpoints tend not to interact in a Hegelian manner, as complementary aspects of a totally satisfactory and a-perspectival view, facets of a singly and all-embracing true position. Rather, contemporary philosophic viewpoints tend to portray themselves as mutually exclusive alternatives only occasionally willing to acknowledge the possible validity or even the intrinsic interest of other perspectives. Thus, although the multiplication of different forms of philosophy in principle means that there are greater possibilities for meaning ful exchange between them, in practice the tendency of each of the various philosophic positions to raise claims to philosophic truth from its point of view alone has had the effect of impeding such interaction.
Download or read book To Be or Not to Be in the Party written by Yuri Glazov and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March of 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Seviet Union. Initially, one could discern serious changes in the policy and statements of this new, young, and obviously efficient leader only with great difficulty. While abroad, Gorbachev had said that anti-Stalinism was a form of anti-Communism. The newspapers were filled with words lauding "the sacred traditions of the 1930's". At the same time, the campaign against drunkenness, corruption, and sloppiness launched by Yuri Andropov was given a new impetus and the highest Party support. In April, 1986, the Chernobyl tragedy took place. The first reaction of the Soviet authorities was the usual one. The Soviet public was not properly informed about the disaster and its unprecedented peril. Millions of jubilant Soviet citizens crowded the squares and streets of Kiev and Minsk during the May Day festivities. We can only guess what the reaction of the Kremlin authorities would have been had not Swedish scientists traced and announced to the world the threatening level of radioactivity. Would the terms "glasnost'" and "perestrojka" have spread through the world press with such intensity and alacrity? A popular Soviet author wrote a year later in the Soviet media: "Chernobyl appeared to be not only a national event, a disaster shared by each of us, but also a dividing line between two eras of time.
Download or read book Beyond Marx and Mach written by K.M. Jensen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A. ALEKSANDR BOGDANOV On April 7, 1928 the career of one of the most extraordinary figures of Russian and early Soviet intellectual life came to an abrupt and premature end. In the process of an experiment on blood transfusion, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovsky, better known as Bogdanov, had exchanged his blood with that of a critically ill malaria victim in hopes of saving both the patient and his blood. The outcome of this may be guessed: both doctor and patient died forthwith. ! Although an extraordinary venture on Bogdanov's part, for it was part of a search for the means to immortality,2 the transfusion experiment was only one of a host of startling things he had done in his thirty years in Russian politics and public life. In actuality, the activities and achievement of his two years as director of the Soviet Union's first institute for the study of blood transfusion seem virtually insignificant beside the events of earlier years. 3 It would be fair to say that Aleksandr Bogdanov stood in a singularly prominent position in the political and intellectual life of Russia from the turn of the century to 1930. Politically, he had been Lenin's only serious rival for leadership among the Bolsheviks before 1917. In the early years of the Soviet regime, Bogdanov stood head and shoulders above any other public figure operating outside the ranks of the Party. Only a handful of men, i. e.
Download or read book Marxism and Religion in Eastern Europe written by R.T. De George and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, two of the most significant but at the same time least understood areas of that revolution's cultural impact have been philosophy and religion. The impact has of course been massive, not only in the Soviet Union but, after the second World War, in Soviet dominated Eastern Europe as well. Yet the consequences of Communism for philosophy and religion throughout the Soviet orbit are far from having the simplicity suggested by the stereotypes of a single, monolithic 'Marxism' and a consistent, crushing assault on the Church and on re ligious faith. Unquestionably Marxism is the ruling philosophy throughout Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, 'Marxism-Leninism' or 'dialectical ma terialism' is the official and the only tolerated philosophy, and most of the other countries of Eastern Europe follow the Soviet lead in philosophy as in other fields. But in the latter countries Marxism was imposed only after W orId War II, and its deVelopment has not always copied the Soviet model. Original thinkers in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary have thought their own way through the writings of Marx and his followers, and have arrived at Marxist positions which are consider ably at variance with the Soviet interpretations - and often with each other. Moreover in recent years the Soviet philosophers themselves have been unable to ignore the theoretical questions raised by the other East of Marxism in the West.
Download or read book Canadian American Slavic Studies written by and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quarterly journal devoted to Russia and East Europe.
Download or read book Leon Rosenfeld Physics Philosophy And Politics In The Twentieth Century written by Anja Skaar Jacobsen and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2012-01-16 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Léon Rosenfeld (1904-1974) was a remarkable, many-sided physicist of exceptional erudition. He was at the center of modern physics and was well-known as Niels Bohr's close collaborator and spokesman. Besides he reflected deeply on the history and philosophy of science and its social role from a leftist perspective. As both actor and acute spectator of modern physics and as a polyglot cosmopolitan whose life crossed those of many important people in both the East and West, as well as by virtue of his close collaboration and friendship with Bohr, Rosenfeld was an important figure in twentieth century physics. His biography illuminates the development, popularization, and reception of quantum physics and its interpretation in addition to the development of the political Left. The book draws extensively from previously untapped, unpublished sources in more than five languages.
Download or read book An Intellectual Biography of N A Rozhkov written by John A. González and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Intellectual Biography of N.A. Rozhkov is the first English language study to follow Russia's most gifted and important historian to emerge from the school of V.O. Kliuchevskii through the transformative decades that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rozhkov's early philosophical influences are examined to explain his radicalisation from middle-class intellectual academic to Leninist-Bolshevik to Menshevik social-democrat. His Marxist-socialist beliefs landed him in gaol several times and eventually he was exiled to Siberia for a decade where he was able to refine his political worldview and develop his theory of historical development. Critical of Lenin and the 1917 revolution, he spent the last decade of his life being persecuted by the Bolshevik regime.
Download or read book Russia and America A Philosophical Comparison written by W.J. Gavin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this year of bicentennial celebration, there will no doubt take place several cultural analyses of the American tradition. This is only as it should be, for without an extensive, broad-based inquiry into where we have come from, we shall surely not foresee where we might go. Nonetheless, most cultural analyses of the American context suffer from a common fault - the lack of a different context to use for purposes of comparison. True, American values and ideals were partly inherited from the European tradition. But that tradition is in many ways an inadequate mode of comparison. Without going too far afield, let us note two points: first, European culture was the proud inheritor of the Renaissance tradition, and, going back still further, of classical culture; second, the European countries are compact. Their land masses are such that the notion of "frontier" simply would not have arisen in the same way as it did in America. On the other side of the globe, however, there does exist a country capable of serving as a suitable mirror. We speak, of course, of Russia. That country also came relatively late onto the cultural horizon, and was not privy to the Renaissance tradition. Furthermore, her land mass is such as to be "experi mentally infmite" in character - not unlike the American frontier. It is hoped that much can be leamed about the present cultural context by com paring the two countries in their youthful stages.
