Defending Materialism

Nobody doubted that atoms were real once atomic energy was developed, but in the early 20th-century and before their existence was widely doubted . Defending Materialism follows the political and theoretical background of this intense philosophical controversy, defending atomistic and mechanical materialism against idealist paradigms. These accounts range from the explicit idealism criticised by Lenin and Einstein to the implicit Hegelian idealism that influenced Soviet dialectical materialism.Following several key threads, the authors trace how the idea of atoms has changed over the centuries, how ideology has influenced both sides of the idealism/materialism divide, and how the nature of time in physics, biology and human society can give a fresh view of historical materialism. Starting from the origins of materialism in ancient Greek thought and moving through its revival in Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin gives a full picture of the links between the Marxist tradition and the ''coarse materiality'' to which the worlds of science and philosophy have found themselves both subscribed and averse.>

Auteur

Greg Michaelson is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Katarina Kolozova is senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, North Macedonia.

Paul Cockshott is a Marxist economist and computer scientist, formerly Reader in Computing Science University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Contenu

1. Introduction
2. Philologico-philosophical Examination of the Conceptual Material proffered by Greek Antiquity and the Trans-millennial Exchanges it has Foregrounded
3. Classical Atomism
4. Dialectics, Materialism, Change From Epicurus to Marx via Aristotle
5. Historical and Mechanical Materialists
6. Idealist Reprise and Responses
7. Logic and Materialism
8. Logic and Dialectical Materialism
9. The Crisis in Logic and the Apotheosis of Anti-formalism
10. Language, Automata and Meaning
11. Dialectical and Stochastic Materialisms

Appendix: How the Ptolemaic Method Works