Marx’s polemic against Proudhon represents a crucial stage in the development of his dialectical method and his conception of history and progress. The critique of Proudhon demonstrates Marx’s hostility towards the very teleological account of social change of which he has himself been accused. In order to redress this imbalance, the break with Proudhon is presented here as a result of Marx’s rejection of the speculative Hegelian dialectic. This rejection is an exercise in self-criticism that is highly relevant to (...) our understanding of Marxian theory in general. (shrink)

This book traces the development of Dialectical Logic within the history of modern western philosophy, culminating in Marx s materialist dialectics. It brings out the essential contours of Logic through a detailed exposition of the ontological and epistem.

A series of essays treating, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the ...

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. _The Dialectical Imagination_ is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt (...) School. (shrink)

Essay one: Parmenidean dialectic -- Essay two: Parmenidean metaphysics -- Essay three: Parmenides and the history of dialectic.

Hegel is one of the most often cited and least read of all major philosophers. He is alternately regarded as the best and the worst that philosophy has produced. Nobody, however, disputes his influence. In Hegel's Dialectic, Terry Pinkard offers a new interpretation of Hegel's program that assesses his conception of the role of philosophy, his method, and some of the specific theses that he defended. Hegel's dialectic is interpreted as offering explanations of the possibility of basic categories. (...) Pinkard argues that the traditional standard reading of Hegel as the esoteric metaphysician of Absolute Spirit overlooks major elements of his thought. In presenting this alternative reading of Hegel, Pinkard offers a new understanding of the role of history in Hegel's thought and a new perspective on his moral and political thought. Departing from the tradition of explicating Hegel exclusively in Hegelian terms, Pinkard discusses the much disputed philosopher in a way that is accessible and appealing to both analytic and non-analytic philosophers. Hegel's Dialectic is not just an interpretation of Hegel's thought: it is also a reconstruction and defense of Hegel's philosophy as having something of importance to say to late twentieth-century philosophers. (shrink)

_Dialectic and Dialogue_ seeks to define the method and the aims of Plato's dialectic in both the "inconclusive" dialogues and the dialogues that describe and practice a method of hypothesis. Departing from most treatments of Plato, Gonzalez argues that the philosophical knowledge at which dialectic aims is nonpropositional, practical, and reflexive. The result is a reassessment of how Plato understood the nature of philosophy.

In Marxism, the material base of society is responsible for a number of structural restraints on the appearance, functioning, and evolution of the superstructure. At the same time, the superstructure, too, and especially ideology, exercises considerable influence on developments in the base, and in certain conditions can prove decisive in transforming the relations that constitute the base. While history is radically open ended and, therefore, nothing is absolutely certain, knowledge of such conditions is a necessary first step toward a socialist (...) reordering of society. (shrink)

Twice in the Poetics, Aristotle contrasts poetry with history. Whatever its didactic value, the contrast has not seemed to readers of special philosophical interest. The aim of this paper is to show that this contrast is philosophically significant not just for our understanding of tragedy but also for the light it sheds on Aristotle’s overall methodology. I shall show how he uses the method sketched in the Topics to define tragedy and explain why the same method will not define history. (...) In particular, tragedy admits of definition because its parts constitute a unity, and much of the Poetics aims to show how, despite being defined through six distinct parts, tragedy can be one. In contrast, history, though a proper preliminary to poetics and concerned also with human action, does not admit of scientific treatment because it contains no essential unities. Aristotle’s understanding of ‘science’ is used here to explain why any attempt to create a scientific history would turn history into poetry. (shrink)

This is an interpretative and evaluative study of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the founding father of the Italian Communist Party who died in 1937 after ten years of imprisonment in Fascist jails. It proceeds by a rigorous textual analysis of his Prison Notebooks, the scattered notes he wrote during his incarceration. Professor Finocchiaro explores the nature of Gramsci's dialectical thinking, in order to show in what ways Gramsci was and was not a Marxist, as well as to illustrate correspondences (...) with the work of Hegel, Croce, and Bukharin. The book provides a critical reappraisal of Gramsci as a thinker and of the dialectical approach as a mode of inquiry. (shrink)

In Marxism, the material base of society is responsible for a number of structural restraints on the appearance, functioning, and evolution of the superstructure. At the same time, the superstructure, too, and especially ideology, exercises considerable influence on developments in the base, and in certain conditions can prove decisive in transforming the relations that constitute the base. While history is radically open ended and, therefore, nothing is absolutely certain, knowledge of such conditions is a necessary first step toward a socialist (...) reordering of society. (shrink)

ExcerptMore than six hundred not entirely new pages from Fredric Jameson is an occasion that provides something for almost everyone. In Valences of the Dialectic, philosophers, all sorts of theorists (political, literary, social), historians, and even people with activist inclinations (for is not Marxism a type of praxis?) will discover rich provocations. By my count a little more than half of the book is new material; the rest is a varied set of articles brought together here to give greater (...) breadth to Jameson's long engagement with dialectical thought. Valences is not the culmination of that engagement, but rather Jameson keeping…. (shrink)

Metaphysics, for Collingwood, is an historical science. Accordingly, nature and the science of nature did not occupy a prominent position within his general scheme. To appreciate this fact and to consider how this deficiency might be overcome requires that we first attend to the disconnected nature of the doctrines that loosely comprise that scheme. More specifically, we must examine the problematical relationship between Collingwood’s familiar theory of presuppositions and his less frequently discussed doctrine of the scale of forms presented in (...) An Essay on Philosophical Method. This latter task will serve as a focus both for an analysis of the general difficulties that beset Collingwood’s particular formulation of a dialectical method, as well as for an exploration of a possible resolution of these difficulties —a resolution along lines which, admittedly, Collingwood himself did not explicitly follow. A few general comments on the tension between dialectical and idealist elements in his metaphysics will conclude the discussion. (shrink)

본고는 중국 유학사에서 순자의 철학이 이단의 오명을 쓰기 이전부터 그것을 탈피할 때까지, 각 시기의 그 사상적 영향력과 지위를 살펴봄으로써 순자 철학의 영향력이 반영하는 일종의 ‘변증법적 특징’을 확인해볼 것이다. 당대 ‘맹자승격운동’부터 송명 이학(理學)의 성립, 청대 유가의 순자 재조명에 이르기까지, 각 시대의 사상적 전환과 이로부터 성립된 주류 사조는 일견 ‘비순(非荀)’ 혹은 ‘존순(尊荀)’의 양면성을 가지는 것처럼 보인다. 그러나 ‘변증법’의 시각에서 그 흐름을 살펴보면, 순자의 철학은 끊임없이 유가 학술 사조와의 일종의 변증적 관계를 맺고 있었음이 확인된다. 이는 곧 순자의 철학이 유학사상 줄곧 주류 철학의 전개와 (...) 발전에 있어 일종의 ‘안티테제(antithesis)’의 역할을 취하였음을 표명한다. (shrink)

Following strict rules of interpretation, this book focuses on the ideas in Plato's early and middle dialogues that lie within the fields now called logic and methodology, specifically elenchus and dialectic and the method of hypothesis.

Answering the call made by Frederic L. Holmes to introduce the concept of the longue durée in the history of science and medicine, this essay sets out to weigh the pros and cons of the concept for the field. It argues that four genres (or traditions) can be distinguished in medical historiography, each with their own ambitions, methods, perspectives and audiences. It concludes by calling for articulated and lively debate between the protagonists of the different genres as the royal way (...) to historical understanding. (shrink)

Collingwood shows that history is the science of mind that gives selfknowledge by asking how historical knowledge is possible. Critics claim he over-intellectualizes the subject matter of history and the historian's process of thinking. The dialectical theory of mind, the theory of absolute presuppositions, and the logic of question and answer-all developed in Collingwood's works other than The Idea of History -show these objections to be mistaken. In his theory of mind, the "thought" reenacted by historians includes feelings, desires, perceptions, (...) and imagination. History differs from current practice, and counter-examples from what are chronicles, not history, do not discredit Collingwood's theories. History provides necessary and complete answers only to specific questions as they reflect a set of absolute presuppositions ; it is re-enactment, not representation, of the past. (shrink)

Graham Priest has brilliantly analyzed Hegel's dialectics, as far as its logical and abstract ontological (metaphysical) structure goes, and has successfully related it to his own logically sophisticated dialethism. After briefly reminding the reader of his account, the paper turns to the other, not purely logical side of Hegel's dialectics, and points to his strategy of bringing together ontological, anthropological and historical matters together with the logical structure, in a manner quite foreign to analytic tradition. It concludes with the proposal (...) that Hegel's way of directly connecting logical ontological, anthropological and historical matters has played the crucial role in the birth of what later became known as specifically ``continental'' philosophy. The paper concludes by raising the question of the relation between the two, the abstract logico-ontological approach, favored by Priest, and the rich, anthropologically and historically informed one found in all major works of Hegel. (shrink)

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that, in modernity, art and philosophy are reciprocally dependent upon each other for legitimation and critical force. This claim has puzzled scholars and provoked controversy. I argue that Adorno’s thesis may be comprehended in the following manner: art requires philosophy because, without the latter, art would lack the power to critique social and historical reality (in particular, the ideological elements that often remain invisible as second nature), and to rationally interpret the material particularity expressed by (...) such reality; and, conversely, philosophy requires art because the latter expresses historical experience to reason. Such material historical experience is necessary in order to prevent philosophy from falling into ideological convention; idle speculation; or abstract and reified instrumentality. Thus, the constellation of history, art, and philosophy is essential to Adorno’s aesthetics. (shrink)

This dissertation is an analysis of the development of dialectic and argumentation theory in post-classical Islamic intellectual history. The central concerns of the thesis are; treatises on the theoretical understanding of the concept of dialectic and argumentation theory, and how, in practice, the concept of dialectic, as expressed in the Greek classical tradition, was received and used by five communities in the Islamic intellectual camp. It shows how dialectic as an argumentative discourse diffused into five communities (...) (theologicians, poets, grammarians, philosophers and jurists) and how these local dialectics that the individual communities developed fused into a single system to form a general argumentation theory (adab al-bahth) applicable to all fields. I evaluate a treatise by Shams al-Din Samarqandi (d.702/1302), the founder of this general theory, and the treatises that were written after him as a result of his work. I concentrate specifically on work by Adud al-Din al-Iji (d.756/1355), Sayyid Sharif al-Jurjani (d.816/1413), Taşköprüzâde (d.968/1561), Saçaklızâde (d.1150/1737) and Gelenbevî (d.1205/1791) and analyze how each writer (from Samarqandi to Gelenbevî) altered the shape of argumentative discourse and how later intellectuals in the post-classical Islamic world responded to that discourse bequeathed by their predecessors. What is striking about the period that this dissertation investigates (from 1300-1800) is the persistence of what could be called the linguistic turn in argumentation theory. After a centuries-long run, the jadal-based dialectic of the classical period was displaced by a new argumentation theory, which was dominantly linguistic in character. This linguistic turn in argumentation dates from the final quarter of the fourteenth century in Iji's impressively prescient work on 'ilm al-wad'. This idea, which finally surfaced in the post-classical period, that argumentation is about definition and that, therefore, defining is the business of language—even perhaps, that language is the only available medium for understanding and being understood—affected the way that argumentation theory was processed throughout most of the period in question. The argumentative discourse that started with Ibn al-Rawandi in the third/ninth century left a permanent imprint on Islamic intellectual history, which was then full of concepts, terminology and objectives from this discourse up until the late nineteenth century. From this perspective, Islamic intellectual history can be read as the tension between two languages: the "language of dialectic" (jadal) and the "language of demonstration" (burhan), each of which refer not only to a significant feature of that history, but also to a feature that could dramatically alter the interpretation of that history. (shrink)

The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception of Hegel's philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel's system, which continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of an absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance, sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic 'Whole'. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that which remains outside of or other to the (...) totalizing system of dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to reduce Hegel's complex philosophy to a straightforward systematic narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel's philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is central to this revaluation of Hegel. (shrink)

<I>Dialectics beyond Dialectics is a study of contemporary French philosophy from Bataille to Derrida. It analyses, on the first level of generalization, the decomposition of Hegelianism understood as <I>philosophy of totality. Many French philosophers of the 20<SUP>th century deconstruct Hegelian dialectics and harshly criticize the very idea of totality as either dangerous or impossible. The thesis of the book is that, on doing so, they do not really break with dialectics, but transform it. On the second level of generalization, the (...) issue of the book is modernity and the thesis is that transformations of dialectics reveal transformations of modern consciousness which - despite hasty declarations on the <I>end of modernity - still remains ours. (shrink)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique (...) of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory. (shrink)

Recently, the government of Zimbabwe unveiled a newly constructed statue of the esteemed spirit medium and liberation icon who intrepidly fought against the British imperialism. The distinguished heroine is passionately known as Mbuya Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana. The lexical item, ‘Mbuya’ in Shona language literally means grandmother. This study examines the ways in which the spectres of religion, historiography, gender and national politics find expression in often contested state narratives of Mbuya Nehanda and in selected Zimbabwean fictional writings. Foucault’s theorisation of (...) socio-political practices and subjectification as sites of power, together with the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework and bell hooks’ feminist thought of ‘talking back’, provide provocative insights about regimes of power that could be more edifying in the interlocking discursive terrain of the African cosmology, frequently disputed archeology of historical memory, socio-political relations, which are noticeable in discourses and gender politics. The study interrogates whether the Nehanda grand narrative is told by politicians as the revolutionary story of all citizens or not. If not, what alternative versions are proffered in selected Yvonne Vera and NoViolet Bulawayo’s literary texts? Arguably, the mythology of Nehanda in the chosen literary texts locates women as agents of revolution thereby generating semantic dissonance in the Zimbabwean context, which is largely considered as land of the Fathers. Contribution: The study situates the Nehanda narrative within contested terrains of national history, gender and religion in Zimbabwe’s transitional politics and literature. It concludes that in Vera and Bulawayo’s writings, the Nehanda narrative is deployed to interject significations of woman (hood) and nation (hood) which seek to marginalise some sections of the society. The dissonances embedded in the Nehanda narrative produce a dialoguing space that’ talks back’ and rebuts single storytelling. (shrink)

The absence of Islam from recent scholarship on Hegel's account of world religions is puzzling. In the first part of the article, we argue that Hegel's neglect of Islam in his systematic account of religious phenomena is not accidental and that he did not think of Islam as a determinate religion. Its size and believers aside, we suggest that it is not possible to assign any determinacy to Islam as a world-historical phenomenon under Hegel's rubric, because such determinacy that applies (...) to other religions would be in conflict with what Hegel takes to be Islam's emphasis on the negative moment of truth, its revolutionary tendencies, and its lack of any novel conceptual content as a response to Christianity. In the second part of the article, we point out how one could respond to Hegel's characterization of Islam when it is mentioned in relation to other religious traditions. First, we argue that Hegel overemphasizes the significance of Islam qua religion in explaining the history of Muslim peoples. More than that, Hegel does not see that the history of Islamic philosophy and science can be characterized by sublation and that it can be integrated into conceptual developments in the West on these terms. However, our critique of Hegel's Eurocentrism does not remain at this level, for in the third part of the article we argue for the significance of considering the response of Muslim philosophers to Hegel. In particular, we look at the responses by Mohammed al-Khosht and Mahmoud Haider, respectively. We conclude that Hegel's exclusion of Islam from any involvement in the history of the Concept indicates an undialectical commitment on his part and that to this extent being Hegelian today requires that we rectify this oversight. (shrink)