File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0306, message 150


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
> 
> 


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