Philosophy

Science is…

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Science is: “patience in investigation and clarity in calculation; singleness of purpose; the power to suspend judgement, to remain, if need be, for a lifetime in doubt; the gift of abstraction, of thinking about things definitely but without too much intrusion of their sensuous qualities; the skill to hold in suspense one’s own tastes and passions, a skill which demands discipline of the most rigorous kind. Without these traits, science as a thing distinct from common sense, from magic, pseudo-science, charlatanism, poetry, religion, religious philosophy, and tendentious belief in general, could hardly have come into being.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is

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Unspoken Assumption

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For Lenin, “an underlying, always unspoken assumption that the new is going to be what he wants it to be, that the real is in harmony with the human ideal, provided it is our ideal, is just as essential to his philosophy as it was to Hegel’s. As a philosopher he is using his mind not merely in order to promote the success of his action, but in order to assure himself that his action will succeed.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin

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Romantic Philosophy

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“For my part, I think there is no intellectual question of more importance to the future of American culture than the question whether we are going to conduct our social efforts in the name of science, or are going to swallow down this romantic German philosophy.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, The Word “Dialectic”.

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Dialectic Metaphysics IS Ideological

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“It is impossible, once you have defined ideology as thinking which is unconscious of its motive, to let Marxism continue to hide its motive in an animistic philosophy of the universe. Marxism as a system of dialectic metaphysics IS ideological, just as all transcendental metaphysics is…”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science?, Part IV The Marxian System, Marx and Freud

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