From: "Andrew Brown" <Andrew-AT-lubs.leeds.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:04:12 +0100 Subject: Re: BHA: Identity - another thought.... Hello Jamie, > Andrew, hi could you just go through what you mean by dialectical > logic and particularly refuting the law of exlcuded middle? I take dialectical logic to be a science of thinking, a theory of knowledge, and, in a materialist version, this is also a science of the most abstract objective, material laws (since true thinking reflects these laws). The content of dialectical logic, the development or substantiation of the abstract definition I just gave, cannot therefore be summed up by reference to some or other formal system. It cannot be summed up in a few words or paragraphs since its scope is to say the least ambitious! It includes much of what might be termed 'epistemology' yet it also includes ontology for reasons I have mentioned. So the main thing to get over is this vast change in scope relative to a more typical definition of logic. Still, Engels did a job of summarising some key propositions with his 'laws of the dialectic' (taken from Hegel, obviously the main guy when it comes to dialectical logic) but these are easily taken to be sterile, formal propositions which is the last thing they are. Sean Creaven discusses Engels very well though I doubt Sean would agree with the definition of dialectical logic I have suggested above. Amongst the relevant aspects to the discussion we have had is the point that the law of the excluded middle, loosely the law that a statement is either true or false but not both, is 'denied' by dialectical logic. I put 'denied' in scare quotes because it is of course true that this law is useful and common sense, within many domains of application, but it does have limits outside of which the law is not true. Better to say 'sublated' I suppose. More generally I take dialectical logic to stress that contradictions play an important role in real, material development and in theory development. Such oppositions as thought and being, universal and particular, identity and difference, their mutual interpenetration, their very identity and difference spur on the dialectic. But these are all wooly phrases without detailed explication. In my CR and Marxism chapter I briefly hint at an explanation of the 'identity-in-opposition' between thought and being developed by Spinoza (at least given Ilyenkov's admittedly idiosyncratic interpretation of Spinoza). I set this out in a proper length in my PhD. Also in the PhD I interpret the so-called 'transformation problem' within Marxist ecnoomics as the development of the contradiction between value and use value (hence not a problem at all). So thought / being and value / use value are the two contradictions I have actually done any work on. Ilyenkov's 1977 'Dialectical Logic: Essays in its Theory and History', Progress, is the major influence on me regarding dialectical logic. Though I would not profess to fully grasp what Ilyenkov is on about.... Best wishes, Andy > > Best, Jamie > > --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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