[Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New School

[Haines Brown]

> I posted the article here:
> 
> http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2008w29/msg00065.htm 

Louis, thanks. The newest issue is not yet available on line via
JStor.

I glanced at the article. Jacoby only looked at three universities,
but his point was not so much to criticize them for ignoring the
specific thinkers of the title, but more broadly for their being
a-historical.

This makes the issue far more interesting than simply omitting Marx et
al. Marx was profoundly historical in his view of things, and it does
seem that we are in a cultural environment today that is oblivious to
history.

But is this so? In many respects it is obvious (such as a replacement
of history with social studies in K-12), but then I think of what's
happened in the philosophy of science, where since the 1980s and 1990s
it has come to embrace the history of science as a critical dimension
of an understanding of science.

I don't know what to make of this inconsistency. In the study of
history itself, there is some influence, but not an awful lot, of the
profoundly anti-historical views of postmodernism. Let me offer an
optimistic speculation.

It may be that as capitalist contradictions deepen, our culture has
become emptied of historical and self-critical content (more
accurately the critique has become a critique of the possibility of
criticism). However, in the natural sciences, which are considered to
be more mature in these matters than other sciences, there seems a
more positive trend toward a constructive self-cricism, as in
scientific realism. In the last few decades it has become a consensus
view that pragmatists and critical-empiricists are to some excent
accomodating. They are possibly slowly moving toward a new unified
view of science (at least that is the opinion of perhaps the most
highly respected text on the philosophy of science). Yesterday I
finished an article ("The succubus of theory and process realism")
that is implicitly on this issue, and so find it very interesting.

Haines Brown