Black Freethought @ Atheist Nexus

The last time I reported here on my Black Freethought group at Atheist Nexus was 10 December 2010. I have reported on the progress of other groups since. There's a lot going on; I can't keep up with everything in a timely fashion. Some time between 10 May and now my group's membership passed the 400 mark. The increase from 318 to 408 members in a six-month period is not spectacular, but 90 new members in a cyberspace in which there is much competition for attention, even for black atheists and their fellow travellers, is a respectable showing.

What Newtonianism was

The thinkers of the scientific revolution, including the scientific geniuses who spearheaded it, had one foot in modernity, one foot in the pre-modern past. We would scarcely recognize their conception of scientific argument as it existed then. Case in point, here are a couple of paragraphs I wrote some years ago about Newtonianism in Newton's time.

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Written 19 November 2003:

A few days ago I read Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob. I once had quite an interest in Newton, circa 1979, when I was interested in the dynamics of the totality of his thought (which includes alchemy and theology) in the cultural-philosophical-ideological complex of his time. This little book shows how archaic Newton was in his overall perspective—he was no mechanist that we would recognize. Aside from his vitalistic conceptions of matter outside of the realm for which he is famous, his aversion to materialism with the ever-present atheistic tendencies attributed to or associated with it reveal a Newton not fully modern and a society caught in irresolvable ideological contradictions. Newtonianism was ideologically tinged with non-scientific political preoccupations: it could be an apology for order or a call to revolution. Newton was of the party of order and moderation, favoring neither revolution nor absolute monarchy.

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Written 17 October 2007, extract from my post on another of my blogs:

For 400 years innovations in the special sciences have yielded master metaphors for organizing an explanation of the entire world and filling in gaps in specific knowledge of all its facets with ideology. From Newtonian physics to Darwinism to relativity to quantum mechanics to information theory to computer science to chaos theory to complexity, the process has never stopped. But in Newton’s time this phenomenon was far worse in that obscurantism per se was not the main issue, but rather the inability to separate scientific theory from metaphysics and theology. (See Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob.) We would not even recognize the arguments over Newtonianism as scientific ones today, as both political and theological positions were staked out with respect to it, and it seems that neither its architects nor its popularizers had an adequate epistemological understanding of the basis of scientific abstraction and how it related to the rest of the world-picture. However, there was some place to go, from astronomy to physics, and finally to chemistry, and the Romantic era coincided with the question as to whether physio-chemical processes alone could account for life. Yet an organismic, vitalistic sense of living matter could not jibe with progress in scientific research, and however mysterious life and consciousness still felt with the progress of " mechanistic" science, vitalism could only lead to mysticism, obscurantism, and regression, and there are no more prospects for it today than there were 200 years ago, when lack of knowledge allowed it a respectable existence. Yet Goldner thinks he can finesse the objective problems of scientific research and its incorporation into a general world-picture by spouting nonsense about cosmobiology, an outmoded basis for world-comprehension.

From: Stephen Eric Bronner (3): Bronner vs. Goldner on science & the Enlightenment

Paul Kurtz and Marxist humanism (4)

This article is only partially available online without a subscription to High Beam Research:

"The Survival of Humankind Is the Basic Humanist Value: An Interview with Svetozar Stojanović" by Paul Kurtz, Free Inquiry, Volume 16, Number 3, Summer, 1996.

This interview covers the history of the Praxis School as well as the later disintegration of Yugoslavia and Stojanović's political role during this period.

Presumably there is related material scattered in the archives of Free Inquiry; for example:

"A Serb's View of NATO's Bombs" by Svetozar Stojanovic, Volume 19, Number 3, Summer, 1999

Paul Kurtz and Marxist humanism (3)

In previous posts I began to document Paul Kurtz's interaction with the Yugoslav Praxis School, particularly Svetozar Stojanović. This time we will feature another leading light of the Praxis School, Mihailo Marković. He also happens to be the Praxis philosopher with whom I am most familiar. In other contexts I prefer to highlight his brilliant philosophical contributions rather than his political degeneration later in life; for example, on my web site:

“Marx and Critical Scientific Thought”

"The Concept of Critique in Social Science"

Dialectical Theory of Meaning: Part One (Extracts)

Dialectical Theory of Meaning: Part Two: Linguistic Meaning (Extract)

Dialectical Theory of Meaning: Part Three: General Definition of Meaning: The Interrelationships of the Individual Dimensions of Meaning

There are numerous books by Marković and Stojanović and at least one by Gajo Petrović in English, as well as several essays by these and other Praxis philosophers in English in print and on the Internet, not to mention the secondary literature. (See for example the Praxis Group in the Marxists Internet Archive.) I just want to mention these books:

Crocker, David A. Praxis and Democratic Socialism: The Critical Social Theory of Marković and Stojanovic. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press; Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983.

Marxist Humanism and Praxis, edited, with translations, by Gerson S. Sher. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1978.

Sher, Gerson S. Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.

The Praxis School is compared with related philosophical dissidents in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in:

Satterwhite, James H. Varieties of Marxist Humanism: Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. (Series in Russian and East European Studies; no. 17)

But back to the philosophical interaction between Marković and Kurtz. I refer now to an interesting volume which contains the contributions itemized below:

Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics, edited by Morris B. Storer. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1980.

Comment by Mihailo Marković on Kurtz [“Does Humanism Have an Ethic of Responsibility?”], pp. 31-33.
Reply by Paul Kurtz to Marković, pp. 33-35.
“Historical Praxis as the Ground of Morality” by Mihailo Marković , pp. 36-50.
Comment by Paul Kurtz on Marković Article, pp. 51-54.
Reply by Marković, pp. 54-57.

When I am able to secure the full text, I will report in greater detail.

Crocker, who incorporates analytical philosophy into his analysis of Marković and Stojanović, devotes some space to a critique of “Historical Praxis as the Ground of Morality.” In a couple of places he mentions disagreement between Marković and Kurtz:

It must be admitted that Marković appears to have two minds about what this “appeal to history” amounts to. On the one hand, he says that three normative attitudes to the course of history are possible and that if soft procedures fail to bring consensus, then “discrepancy in value judgments cannot be overcome” (HP 40). Moreover, in responding to Paul Kurtz, who takes Marković to be trying to deduce the Ought of praxis from the Is and Was of history. [44] Marković says, “It [Praxis] cannot be derived from any factual judgment (which would constitute the naturalistic fallacy) but it is linked with a basic factual assumption—'Praxis is enente of history,' or more clearly: ‘Praxis is the specific necessary condition of all historical development’” (HP 57). On the other hand, both in HP proper and in his response to Kurtz, Marković appears to have something close to hard justificatory intentions. In the latter Marković claims that ethical pluralism gives rise to the need for “a foundation of ethical values” (HP 55). That is, because “various groups or individuals have genuine moral convictions with implicit claims to universal validity,” and because “these convictions are different or even incompatible,” one must ask oneself, “What is the ground on which his implicit claim to universal validity rests?” (HP 55). [p. 214]

. . . with this footnote:

44. Kurtz charges, “Marković seems to be committing one form of the naturalistic fallacy by defining as intrinsically ‘good’ one aspect of human history (praxis) and then reading that into the process as a ground for his preferences.” “Comment,” in Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics, ed. Morris B. Storer (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1980), p. 52. [p. 223]

And here is the other comment:

Because people are used to a dichotomous either‑or (or to compromise positions), they (like Paul Kurtz) are likely to construe Marković’s procedures in terms of the dichotomy [of relativism and absolutism/dogmatism]. To the hard justificationist and skeptic, Markovic’s approach will look like no justification. To the absolutist, Markovic’s soft procedures will appear relativistic. After all, Marković does not demonstrate praxis and proceeds on the assumption that there is no way to get conclusive proof that one ethical outlook should hold for all people at all times. Moreover, what else is relativism but an unhappy compromise that weds skepticism to the view that each moral outlook is true (for its group)? And do not Marković’s procedures entail that any group (or individual) that employs them will emerge with what is ethical truth for it (him and/or her)? [p. 219]

These are, of course, only fragments of Crocker's presentation. In Storer's volume itself there are main essays by both Kurtz and Marković, and exchanges between the two on both of them. I will save further commentary for a future post.

One Marxist view of Dawkins & Harris

This is old stuff, but here's the info. I could quibble over some details, but there are important criticisms here of the political and social ignorance of Richard Dawkins and especially of Sam Harris. These pieces come from the World Socialist Web Site. Sectarian politics notwithstanding, there are some intelligent commentaries from a philosophical perspective.

Atheism in the service of political reaction: A comment on author Sam Harris

By Christie Schaefer, April 16, 2007

In the recent review of Richard Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion, Joe Kay mentions in passing the author Sam Harris, noting that the idealist standpoint of Harris and some of the other advocates of atheism is often bound up with reactionary political conceptions. (See “Science, religion and s

Science, religion and society: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion

By Joe Kay, March 15, 2007

In his new book, Dawkins has done us a service, if only in making more acceptable the general proposition that religion and science are at odds with each other, and that it is science that should win out.

Social paranoia: one photo says it all

I snapped this photo in early April 2011 across the street from the Southeast branch of the Washington DC library. It perfectly illustrates the ideology of right wing paranoia that forms the subject of my current research.

Theorizing Social Paranoia (2)

 Listen to my podcast on this subject:

Dumain, Ralph. “Theorizing Social Paranoia,” 22 May 2011, 58 min., an episode of "Studies in a Dying Culture" on "Think Twice Radio".