![]() The “Three World Religions” as Material Forces in Historyīut Engels was, we know, aware early on of the “three world religions” as conceptualized by German thinkers such as Cornelius Petrus Tiele. ( Ming can be translated as either “dialecticians” or “logicians.” In medieval European monasteries and universities, “dialectics” and “logic” were generally conflated.) He probably was unaware of the Ming jia or School of Dialecticians in China that flourished between the fifth and third centuries BCE. 480-540) who established a school of Buddhist logic. In 1883 Engels presciently noted, in his Dialectics of Nature, that “dialectical thought – precisely because it presupposes investigations of the nature, of concepts themselves – is only possible for man, and for him only at a comparatively high stage of development ( Buddhists and Greeks) and it attains its full development much later still through modern philosophy – and yet we have the colossal results already among the Greeks which by far anticipate investigation!”Įngels was of course unaware of Nagarjuna, the master dialectician of Buddhism in the second century CE, who explicated the concept of sunyata (emptiness), or Dignaga (ca. Or that Lenin, commenting on the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, says he provided in his On Nature-composed around 500 BCE - “a very good exposition of the rudiments of dialectical materialism.”)īut one must note, in this era of greater world-historical consciousness than existed in Marx’s time, that not only Greek sophists, but thinkers in ancient India, produced materialist and rationalist schools of thought rooted in the examination of contradiction. ![]() (It should shock no one to realize that Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation, written in 1841, was on Democritus and Epicurus. The perception that everything contradicts itself, and exists in a state of ongoing transformation, along with the practice of seeking truth through the systematic pitting of ideas against one another, dates back to the ancient Greeks. In the beginning was the dialectic, or at least at the beginning of philosophy. Anderson’s “Lenin’s Encounter with Hegel after Eighty Years: A Critical Assessment” (MarxismoCritico, ) and some recent involvements with Revolutionary Marxist Students, publishers of the new student journal Red Horizon which engages “a variety of topics from a Marxist perspective in an attempt to provide theoretical clarity for student politics and counter the current swamp of liberalism.” 2 of this year Nick Pemberton’s subsequent defense of the Slovenian philosopher (based on “ reading him seriously”) a reading of Kevin B. The following thoughts were prompted by Gabriel Rockhill’s truculent essay, “ Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Zizek” on Jan. ![]()
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