Although many facets of Lev Vygotsky’s life have drawn considerable attention from historians of science, perhaps the most popular feature of his personal narrative was that his work was actively chastised by the Stalinist government. Almost all contemporary references to Vygotsky’s personal history emphasize that from 1936 to 1956, it was forbidden to either discuss or disseminate any of Vygotsky’s works within the Soviet Union. Although this ‘Vygotsky ban’ is both widely acknowledged and frequently cited by a variety of scholars, (...) the exact nature of this alleged Communist party censure has received far less historical attention. Through focusing on the logistics of Soviet ‘bans,’ this article attempts to shed light on this historical mystery and augment the growing body of revisionist literature that serves to deconstruct the mythologized persona of Lev Vygotsky. (shrink)

The authors of the volume under review proclaimed a “revisionist revolution” in Vygotsky studies. With the exception of the two chapters by Ekaterina Zavershneva, everything else in the book is written by Anton Yasnitsky—solo or in collaboration with René van der Veer, Eli Lamdan and Jennifer Fraser. It is demonstrated how the “Vygotsky cult” took shape and eventually spread throughout the world, and how the “myths” and “dogmas” of that cult are later subjected to deconstruction. The editors, van (...) der Veer and Yasnitsky, give an overview of Vygotsky’s published works and critically analyze editorial interventions in his texts, mainly in the six-volume Collected Works. The final chapter is devoted to the “birth of the cultural–historical Gestalt psychology,” focusing attention on the story of Vygotsky’s personal contacts with Gestalt psychologists. (shrink)

This article looks at three historical efforts to coordinate the scientific study of biological and cultural aspects of human consciousness into a single comprehensive theory of human development that includes the evolution of the human body, cultural evolution and personal development: specifically, the research programs of Wilhelm Wundt, Lev Vygotsky and Albert Bandura. The lack of historical relations between these similar efforts is striking, and suggests that the effort to promote cultural and personal sources of consciousness arises as a natural (...) foil to an overemphasis on the biological basis of consciousness, sometimes associated with biological determinism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent debates about conceptual engineering, it appears that the internalist has an explanatory advantage when it comes to accounting for meaning change and conceptual change. In this paper, I argue against this impression. I show how two different varieties of externalism, originalism and anti-individualism, can coherently explain various cases of meaning change, irrespective of whether they involve proper names or kind terms; and also irrespective of whether they occur in everyday, legal, or scientific contexts. I point out which (...) mechanisms and interpretational strategies the originalist and anti-individualist can invoke, relative to their respective background assumptions about the nature of concepts. Furthermore, I offer an argument in favour of the claim that externalism as such has no implications concerning whether concepts can undergo change. I establish this by showing that originalism allows for conceptual change while anti-individualism insists on conceptual stability. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby (...) save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence. (shrink)

In this volume, Baumstark deals with the transmission of Aristotelian philosophy into Syriac and Arabic. Syriac texts with German translations are included, alongside a detailed study of their textual interrelationships.

An influential objection to the view that intentions are non-derivatively relevant to the moral permissibility of actions states that if intentions were relevant to permissibility in such a way, one would have to take them into account in decision making, which would be odd (in some morally relevant sense of ‘oddness’). The paper outlines and assesses three candidates for the oddness: that considering intentions in decision making is an unordinary practice, that it is impossible or conceptually confused, and that it (...) assigns intentions the weight as moral considerations that they intuitively do not have. The paper rejects the first two and shows that the third is probably what motivates most critics of the relevance of intentions who raise this objection. If this is correct, the objection is a non-starter as it assumes what it has to prove. Towards the end, it is argued that the objection does not serve as a plausible error theory either. (shrink)

Pannekoek, Lenin, and the future of Marxist philosophy -- Note on the text -- Introduction -- Marxism -- Middle class materialism -- Dietzgen -- Mach -- Avenarius -- Lenin -- The criticism -- Natural science -- Materialism -- Plekhanov's views -- The Russian revolution -- The proletarian revolution.