Philosophy and science

Lukacs was an important influence on what is called ‘western Marxism’.
This was seen as a ‘humanist’ alternative to the dominant stalinist
orthodoxy of the inter-War period and later. One of Lukacs’ most
significant arguments was that (contrary to Engels) there can be no
dialectics of nature. Dan Morley examines the debate and goes into the
contradictory relationship between Lukacs’ interpretation of Marxism and
Stalinism.

During the 1980s
and 1990s, advances in chaos and complexity theory began to demonstrate a fact
understood more than a century and a half earlier by the founders of scientific
socialism, Marx and Engels, that systems which show an apparently high degree
of complexity or “design” do not require the hand of a creator but emerge naturally
from the apparently mundane interacting and contradictory forces at play inside
the system. It may come as a surprise to many then to find that in the field of
cosmology there are respected scientists groping towards the revival of the
mystical idea of intelligent design.

In this part of the series on The History of Philosophy, Alan Woods explores the development of materialist philosophy on a higher level as the ideas of dialectics were re-discovered, but with the intervening progress of philosophy during the Renaissance.

In this final part of the series on the History of Philosophy, Alan Woods examines the important role of Indian and Islamic philosophical ideas, and the way in which these influenced and impacted back upon Western philosophy.

This text was originally written as a section of the book Reason in Revolt: Marxist philosophy and modern science, but eventually the book became too long and this section had to be left out. Therefore this history of philosophy is published here for the first time, starting with the question: “Do we need philosophy?”

Over a hundred years after Darwin, the idea that everything changes is generally accepted among educated people. It was not always so. In this part of his series on the History of Philosophy, Alan Woods examines the first “dialecticians”, who tried to understand the processes of motion and change in nature.

Marx called Aristotle the “The greatest thinker of antiquity”. In this part of his series on The History of Philosophy, Alan Woods examines the ideas and contributions of Aristotle and the impact on later Classical philosophy.

Modern science takes its starting point from the Renaissance, that marvellous period of spiritual and intellectual rebirth, which put and end to the thousand year reign of ignorance and superstition. Humanity once again looked to nature with eyes unblinkered by dogma. The philosophers of the Renaissance rediscovered the wonders of classical Greek philosophy and pointed science onto the right path.

Trotsky’s ‘ABC of Materialist Dialectics’ is a brilliant short explanation of Marxist philosophy. It was written as part of a defence of Marxism against a middle-class revisionist tendency in the American Trotskyist movement in the late 1930s, which attempted to challenge its basic principles. As opposed to pragmatism and empiricism, Trotsky defended dialectical materialism as a richer, fuller, more comprehensive view of society and life in general.

Dialectical materialism is the revolutionary philosophy of Marxism. In this article, Rob Sewell explains this fundamental aspect of the Marxist method.

Dialectical materialism is the fundamental method of Marxism: a philosophy that seeks to analyse and explain the world due to the processes and material conditions in nature; a philosophy that seeks to explain change and motion. John Pickard provides an introduction to this revolutionary philosophy at the heart of Marxism.