Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 06:22:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Toilet boil of bourgeois thought  (fwd)


At 08:35 AM 6/1/97 PST, James Farmelant wrote:
>  I have recently been reading Sebastiano
>Timpanaro's *On Materialism* and he too makes a complaint similar to
>Ralph's though he expresses his a bit more elegantly.

I have a great admiration for Timpanaro.  I always knew Paul Piccone was a
snob, but when he dissed Timpanaro, that was th4e last straw for me, even
before his turnabout to the right.  I know nothing about the context in
which Timpanaro operated.  However, I read somewhere that Popper is a big
cheese in Italy, and that what would be elsewhere be denounced as shallow
positivism was welcomed there because the Italians were sick of having Croce
lodged in their colon for a century and natural science materialism was
liberating to them after enduring so much idealism for so long.

>Just as the rise of the Frankfurt School was reflective of the 
>predominance in bourgeois culture of such currents as psychoanalysis
>and phenomenology and the rise of Althusserianism was reflective of the 
>predominance of structuralism in French intellectual culture so Timpanaro's
>championing of an Engelsian materialism can be see as reflecting the 
>revival of a natural science materialism in bourgeois academic culture.  

You mean in Italy in the '60s?

>And indeed events since 1970 (or whereabouts when T. wrote that essay)
>confirm this view.  In academic philosophy we have seen several varieties
>of materialism become popular especially in the philosophy of mind-
>witness the work of the Churchlands, of Dennett etc.

Are these the most popular currents?

>The point of this is that like it or not a serious consideration of
>Marxist thought cannot avoid discussions of and confrontations with the
work of >leading bourgeois thinkers nor is it going to be immune to the
prevailing >intellectual currents of bourgeois culture.

Sigh ..... Everybody insists that Lukacs' THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON really
sucks, but I refuse to believe it until I give it a scrute myself.  I would
love to do what Lukacs trued to do but I'll never have the time. 

I haven't read a word by Simone Weil for 20-something years.  What worthless
crap.  And Hannah Arendt!  Too nauseating to contemplate.  Good for you you
have the stamina to engage these people.  I fainted in the autopsy room.



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