Dialectical materialism

During the next decade, progress seemed painfully slow to observers of the international hydrogen scene, resembling the kind of forward lurches often ascribed to the dialectical materialism school of history—two steps forward followed by one backward. Still, from the vantage point of the late... 

T.D. Thao Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1986... 

Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895) Founder, along with Karl Marx (1818-1883) of the dialectical materialism, the philosophy which is not merely a philosophy of history, but a philosophy which illuminates all events whatever, from the falling of a stone to a poet s imaginings (from the preface to Dialectics of Nature, written by J. B. S. Haldane in 1939). 

Both Badiou and Zizek each align the Lacan of the Symbolic (i.e., the early Lacan) and the Lacan of the Real (i.e., the late Lacan) with idealism and materialism, respectively. In Theone du sujet (a text mobilized by Bosteels in a debate with Zizek over Badiou s ambivalence toward Lacan), Badiou, during the course of an effort to reformulate a viable dialectical materialism, is one of the first authors to insist on this division within Lacan s oeuvre (he speaks of a trajectory from the primacy of the symbolic to the consistency of the real ). Moreover, he goes so far as to posit a division internal to the concept of the Real (this split within the Real mirroring the larger split between the Symbolic and the Real) The line of demarcation between idealism and materialism in Lacan s thought must... be drawn through the very concept of the real. 

Bosteels, Bruno. 2001. Alain Badiou s Theory of the Subject The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism (Part One). Ph The Warwick foumal of Philosophy 12 (Fall) 200-229. 

Dialectical Materialism (Part Two). Pli The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 13 (Spring) 173-208. 

For the present purpose dialectical materialism can be taken as the view that (ij everything that exists consists of matter-energy, [ii] this matter-energy develops in accordance with universal laws, [iii] knowledge is the result of a complex interaction between human(s) and their external world (but both humans and their external world are part of the same material world). 

The issue fell on fertile ground, not so much because of the principles of dialectical materialism, but because there had been priority disputes since 1863 about the originators of the theory of chemical structure (Butlerov, Couper and Kekule), in particular between German and Russian historians. That in English publications the name of Kekule dominates, Couper may be mentioned briefly and Butlerov often not at all seems to be an obvious bias. On the other hand, it is equally wrong to claim that Butlerov is the true creator of the theory of chemical structure. Probably it is fair to say that Butlerov, Couper, and Kekule between them made all the important contributions but, because they knew each others work and met one another on their journeys, a ranking in terms of priority doesn t make much sense. It might be added that Butlerov and Kekule were personal friends, and as far as can be known did not quarrel about priority. 

That this example of the politicisation of science had more to do with nationalism than with dialectical materialism is confirmed by the fact that in the GDR, the general issue of the significance of the development of quantum chemistry was... 

With the decline of dialectical materialism as a political force, discussions on the philosophy of chemistry in Eastern Europe disappeared. While philosophy of science in the tradition of logical empiricism was interested in what Kant called proper science, i.e. exact (mathematised, if possible axiomatised) science, under dialectial materialism in Eastern Europe there was more room for the philosophy of the science(s) of different kinds of matter (though still not very much). 

The calculation is in principle quite straightforward, but the parameters are uncertain, as we mentioned earlier. For this reason, the theory of galactic evolution should not be viewed as a mature theory, but rather as a realistic scenario. Running the history of the Milky Way up to the present epoch, we can follow through the behaviour of gas, stars and metals, which are dialectically related. From this great material adventure, the following trends are singled out ... 

As Marc Shell notes, however, hypothesis is inherently bound up with money. To make a hypothesis is to ask for credit that may be called in later, when a conclusion is reached and meaning exhausted. When Plato criticized the sophists, he simultaneously expressed anxiety about coinage—that is, as a division between symbolic and material value Was not even Socratic dialectic. . . pervaded by the monetary form of exchange Was not dialectical division a kind of money changing, and dialectical hypothesizing a kind of hypothecation, or mortgaging (Shell 2). 

Of this Engels notes Is this not a splendid material proof of the way in which the determinations of thought are resolved into one another All of nature, like history, is dialectical, and dialectics is the intellectual mode of appreciating this. Furthermore, Engels researches into comparative physiology provided him with... 

These observations are preliminary the model is also our first attempt to understand the observations. Although ferroelectricity can be consistent with an amorphous structure in theory, to be able to demonstrate such a phenomenon unequivocally is by no means an easy task. However, the preceding discussion may be helpful in shedding light on future efforts in the sense that it suggests a possible avenue to prepare structurally controlled amorphous materials, which may be essential to the preparation of any amorphous material with locally dialectically soft structural units, as proposed by Lines [51]. After all. 

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