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What's New:
April
2008 Latest
26/04/08: I am progressively re-writing
Essay
Sixteen, which is an extended summary of my ideas. Because of its
length, it has been broken up into manageable sections, each corresponding
more-or-less to one of the main Essays.
To that
end, I have just finished the summary of Essay Ten
Part One: Dialectics -- Refuted By History.
24/04/08: Because of the interest it is receiving (in fact it is currently the
most visited page at this site), I have just re-written Essay Ten
Part One,
making numerous small changes and correcting a few errors and typos.
23/04/08: Essay One has
just be re-written. This Essay explains the background to my work, and serves as
an Introduction.
21/04/08: The re-write of Essay Thirteen
Part One
(on Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism) has just been completed.
I have
corrected several errors and typos and added about 3500 words of new material.
17/04/08: I have just re-written
Essay Five, since it is still attracting much
interest.
I have
corrected a few errors and typos, made the argument clearer and added small
amounts of new material.
It is
now just short of 5% longer.
I am
also in the process of re-writing Essay Thirteen
Part One,
posting the changes as they are being made.
March
2008 Latest
31/03/08: The summary of Essay Nine
Part Two has just been published -- 'Militants
on Methadone'.
This
outlines the reasons why I think dialecticians have swallowed this ruling-class
theory, and the consequent damage this has done to Marxism.
27/03/08: I have now written and posted a summary of Essay Nine
Part One: 'Dialectics -- A Ruling-Class Theory'.
24/03/08: I have just written the
Summary of Essay Eight Part Two -- Why
'Dialectical Contradictions' cannot be equated with opposing forces.
20/03/08: Over the last few months I have been completely re-writing Essay
Sixteen (which is an extended introduction to and summary of my work), breaking it up into
manageable parts.
Well,
as part of that, I
have now written the
Summary to Essay Eight Part One.
18/03/08: I have just re-written Essay Twelve
Part One,
correcting several errors, and adding new material. I have also tried to make
the argument even clearer.
That
Essay is now approx 3,500 words longer.
17/03/08: Visitors can find my pictures of the recent anti-war demonstration in
London,
here.
07/03/08: I have just finished re-writing
Essay Five
-- 'Motion is not Contradictory' -- making numerous small changes, correcting
several errors and typos, and adding some new material. It is now about 1000
words longer.
05/03/08: A few weeks ago, a sympathetic reader of my Essays added a comment
about my work to the article on DM at Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, a rather miffed Maoist and a thin-skinned Trotskyist deleted it
(the latter after it had been restored).
Apparently, such 'scientific' comrades cannot tolerate the idea that their
theory has been systematically demolished, and think that censoring me will make
me or my ideas go away.
However, the original poster has restored it again. You can read it
here (if it is still there!).
[It can
be accessed in the History section of that article anyway.]
04/03/08: The seminar in Oxford went well. I filmed the talk and subsequent
discussion, but the lighting was poor. If I can improve the quality of the video
on edit, I'll post it on YouTube.
I'll
also post a transcript of the talk, and discussion at a later date.
February
2008 Latest
28/02/08: Essay Nine
Part Two has just been re-written; I have
corrected a few errors, clarified the argument somewhat and added new material.
It is now just under 2000 words longer.
Essay Five
is still being re-written
Also, I
have just received the second edition of Reason In Revolt by Woods and
Grant.
The
chapter on logic is still among the worst I have ever seen in a book about
dialectics, even though, at my suggestion, Alan Woods has removed the syntactic
mess that used to appear on page 98.
The
book still makes grossly erroneous remarks about
Wittgenstein (among others), and it repeats all the old errors
(debunked at this site) as if they were eternal truths.
On page
101, the authors still manage to get George Boole's name wrong (they call him 'George
Boyle') even though I pointed this error out to Woods in 2004 -- just as they
mis-spell Gottlob Frege's name on the same page.
These
might seem small errors, but they reveal how sloppy dialecticians are when it
comes to logic -- even after such things have been pointed out to them!
[There
are plenty
more examples of this sort of thing
here.]
25/02/08: I have just received a copy of Science, Marxism and the Bog Bang,
by Peter Mason. While this book is a short critique of Woods and Grant's
Reason in Revolt, it is by far and away the most measured and reasonable
defence I have ever seen of Dialectical Materialism. I will add a few comments
about this book to Essay Seven at a later date.
Added later: I wrote the above after reading only half of the said
book. However, much of the second half is highly repetitive, the author becoming
fixated on infinity, saying more or less the same thing over and over again for
the next 60 pages!
I am
also in the process of re-writing
Essay Five in view
of the fact that it is attracting quite a lot of attention right now.
21/02/08: I have just re-written
Essay One, correcting several errors, and
adding new material. It is now about 5% longer.
14/02/08: A few months ago, I wrote a very basic outline of the egregious
logical errors Hegel committed, which launched the 'dialectic', and which
subsequent prominent Marxists accepted uncritically.
I have now
re-written it to make the argument even
clearer.
It was
originally designed for those who found the extended argument
here,
here,
here
and
here a
little too daunting.
That
being so, the dialectic has no foundation in logic, or in fact.
It is
no surprise therefore to find it has presided over 150 years of almost total
failure.
12/02/08: After a long delay, I have finally published Essay Thirteen Part One:
Lenin's
Disappearing Definition Of Matter.
This
Essay took me far longer to complete than I had imagined!
01/02/08: The next Essay to be published will be ready to post in the next week
or so. It is Essay Thirteen Part One, which will demolish what is easily Lenin's
worst published work: the lamentable Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
Apologies for the delay, but it has been far harder to finalise than I had
anticipated.
A
supporter of this site will be addressing a conference on the renewal of the
left, to be held at Oxford University at the end of February.
More
details
here.
January
2008 Latest
18/01/08: A day or so ago, I received a copy Of Hartley Slater's excellent book,
The De-Mathematisation Of Logic
(Polimetrica, 2007).
This
work is relevant to aims of this site in so far as its last chapter,
'Dialetheias Are Mental Confusions' puts paid to large sections of 'Dialetheism'
(which some might think gives support to 'Materialist Dialectics', even though
this is not the case; the 'contradictions' of 'Dialetheic Logic' are not
'dialectical contradictions').
I
must add however that Hartley is in no way connected with the political or
philosophical views
expressed at this site.
17/01/08: Visitors to this site are warmly encouraged to
pre-order a copy of Richard Seymour's book:
The Liberal Defence Of Murder, to be
published in July.
Here is
the synopsis:
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
a number of prominent thinkers on the Left found themselves increasingly aligned
with their ideological opposites. Over the last decade, many of these thinkers
have become close to Washington; forceful supporters of the War on Terror, they
help frame arguments for policymakers and provide the moral and intellectual
justification for Western military intervention across the globe. From Kanan
Makiya, one of the chief architects of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq,
to Bernard Henri-Levy's advocacy of "humanitarian" intervention, "The Liberal
Defense of Murder" traces the journey of these figures from left to right and
explores their critical role in the creation of the new American empire. With
wide-ranging testimony from many key figures on the left, this is a crucial
account of the emergence of the "pro-war left," and its shaping of our post-9/11
world.
15/01/08: I have just completed a re-write of Essay Eight
Part Two,
correcting a few errors, and adding new material. I have also endeavoured to
make the argument much clearer.
It is
now just short of 10% longer, at 83,000 words.
08/01/08: I have just received a copy of
A Marxist Philosophy of Language by
Jean-Jacques Lecercle (Brill, 2006 -- published in the Historical Materialism
Book Series), which I had hoped would be the first significant
Marxist contribution in this area. [Voloshinov's study is, despite the
undeserved praise it receives from comrades, worse than poor.]
Initial
reading suggests that we still await such a work --, for, as seems to be the case
with 20th Century French Philosophy, parochialism appears to be more important
than relevance, vague generalisation preferred over detailed work.
I will
be publishing an Essay on the Philosophy of Language (in relation to Marxism)
later this year, so I will say more about this book then; but any study that
devotes far more space to the ideas of Stalin than to those of Wittgenstein or
Frege in this area (as this book does) should not have been allowed to see the light of day.
What
were the editors of Historical Materialism thinking about!
06/01/08: A representative of this site has been invited to give a talk about my
ideas at a conference on the renewal of the left at Oxford University, on
Saturday March 1st.
More
details as when they become known.
The
next Essay to be published will be Thirteen Part One (which is largely about
Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism). It should be up by the end of
January.
[The
long delay was caused by illness and the holidays.]
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