Date: Tue, 7 Mar 1995 19:08:50 +0800 From: Adam Bandt <bandt-AT-cleo.murdoch.edu.au> Subject: Re: Bhaskar and dialectics After reading Ralph Dumain's posting about Bhaskar's 'constant barrage of impenetrable, abstract prose, indulging in unbridled name- and concept-dropping with every word, ' etc etc, I was prompted to re-read a review of a book he edited called _A Meeting of Minds: Socialists discuss philosophy - towards a new symposium_. The review was called 'Critical Unrealism', and appeared in Radical Chains, 1993, no 4. Initially, I dismissed the review as mere anti-intellectualism. Consider the following quote about Bhaskar's discussion of Rorty's 'Nietzschean superstructures' and 'linguistified monisms': 'This is a lot of '-ists' and '-eans' to be crammed into less than two pages of text. It is not, however, the result of trying to distil the essence of his longer works into a small space. Readers of Bhaskar's weightier tomes - the Possibility of Naturalism, for example - will have noticed the same tendency at work there. The suspicion is that the adjectives - 'positivist', 'Nietzschean', 'superidealist', and so on - are doing all the work. They are surrogates for real argument. What exactly is a 'dualist overly anti-naturalist hue'? How would you recognise a 'superidealist epistemology' if you encountered one?' Nonetheless, I remember that Bhaskar's piece in the 3 volume 'Issues in Marxist Philosophy' set published in the 1970's (I could get the exact reference if anyone is interested) made a huge impact on me in schematising my understanding of different approaches to epistemology and social scientific knowledge. I'd be curious as to whether list-contributors believe that Bhaskar is becoming not only less clear but less useful, as my impression is that his earlier work has influenced marxist/critical social science more than his later work. On a related topic, has anyone read Wal Suchting's 'Studies in Marxist Philosophy: Three Essays' [I think this is the title]? If the issue of epistemology revives on this mailing list, I think it would be a useful reference. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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