Re: The materialist road...Tony Smith?

[Justin Schwartz <jschwart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So, Chris, please say briefly what your understanding of internal
relations is.

Btw, Tony distances himself from Roemer and Elster, but not from AM like
Fisk and me. I guess he thinks we're dialectical. Maybe we are. Under
certain descriptions I would not reject that label.

--Justin

On Tue, 16 Jan 1996, Chris M. Sciabarra wrote:

> 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
> ==================================================
>
>
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