Re: The materialist road...Tony Smith?

["Chris M. Sciabarra" <sciabrrc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, at the very least, Tony Smith certainly does his best to distance
himself FROM the analytic Marxists, given his own treatment of some of
their stars in his DIALECTICAL SOCIAL THEORY AND ITS CRITICS.

I think one of the best parts of the book is the parallel that Smith
notes between the Hegelian categories of individual-universal-particular
(found in Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC), with specific Marxian counterparts.
What is so wonderful about the analysis is that any attempt to abstract
any of these parts from the wider totality must lead to distortion in the
radical project, in Smith's view.   I think that the importance of
internal relations is also subsumed in the dialectical approach, as Hans
suggests, and that analytic thinkers (not necessarily just analytic
Marxists) are far more likely to view things in externalist terms.  But
this is a bounded internalism, not the kind of internalism that one would
find in exotic philosophy texts that assume that there is, or that we can
know, the internal relationship between, say, the book on my table and
a butterfly in New Zealand.  The dialectical approach focuses on internal
relations within a specific context, not in terms of an Absolute.  That
is simply a vestige of idealism which is better left in the philosophy texts.

                                        - Chris
==================================================
Dr. Chris M. Sciabarra, Visiting Scholar, NYU Department of Politics
INTERNET:  sciabrrc@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://pages.nyu.edu/~sciabrrc
==================================================


     --- from list marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---

     ------------------