Materialist Philosophy of History

Materialist Philosophy of History PDF Author: Branko Mitrovic´
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793620016
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
What does it mean for our understanding of history if we assume that everything is physical and that no immaterial entities, forces, or phenomena exist? A Materialist Philosophy of History: A Realist Antidote to Postmodernism examines the implications of a materialist worldview in contemporary philosophy of history. Materialism has wide-ranging consequences for historical research as well as for the credibility of various conceptions of the historical past. Branko Mitrović shows how these implications pertain both to the nature of social institutions and the capacities of historical figures to decide, act, acquire beliefs, and communicate and to the methodology of historical research and problems, such as the interpretation and the translation of historical documents. A materialist view also entails rejecting the view that forces such as culture, language, or society can construct physical reality or that the historical past is constructed through the work of the historian. This book examines these consequences and presents a comprehensive materialist perspective on historical research and the understanding of the historical past.

Materialist Philosophy of History

Materialist Philosophy of History PDF Author: Branko Mitrovic´
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793620016
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
What does it mean for our understanding of history if we assume that everything is physical and that no immaterial entities, forces, or phenomena exist? A Materialist Philosophy of History: A Realist Antidote to Postmodernism examines the implications of a materialist worldview in contemporary philosophy of history. Materialism has wide-ranging consequences for historical research as well as for the credibility of various conceptions of the historical past. Branko Mitrović shows how these implications pertain both to the nature of social institutions and the capacities of historical figures to decide, act, acquire beliefs, and communicate and to the methodology of historical research and problems, such as the interpretation and the translation of historical documents. A materialist view also entails rejecting the view that forces such as culture, language, or society can construct physical reality or that the historical past is constructed through the work of the historian. This book examines these consequences and presents a comprehensive materialist perspective on historical research and the understanding of the historical past.

Materialist Philosophy of History

Materialist Philosophy of History PDF Author: Branko Mitrovic
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781793620026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"This book examines the wide-ranging implications for historical research of the view that everything is physical and that no immaterial entities, forces, or phenomena exist. It presents the consequences of materialism for our understanding of the historical past, including the rejection of postmodernist perspectives on history"--

Materialism

Materialism PDF Author: Robin Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429535376
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The doctrine of materialism is one of the most controversial in the history of ideas. For much of its history it has been aligned with toleration and enlightened thinking, but it has also aroused strong, often violent, passions amongst both its opponents and proponents. This book explores the development of materialism in an engaging and thought-provoking way and defends the form it takes in the twenty-first century. Opening with an account of the ideas of some of the most important thinkers in the materialist tradition, including Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Hume, Darwin and Marx, the authors discuss materialism’s origins, as an early form of naturalistic explanation and as an intellectual outlook about life and the world in general. They explain how materialism’s beginnings as an imaginative vision of the true nature of things faced a major challenge from the physics it did so much to facilitate, which now portrays the microscopic world in a way incompatible with traditional materialism. Brown and Ladyman explain how out of this challenge materialism developed into the new doctrine of physicalism. Drawing on a wide range of colourful examples, the authors argue that although materialism does not have all the answers, its humanism and commitment to naturalistic explanation and the scientific method is our best philosophical hope in the ideological maelstrom of the modern world.

Marx

Marx PDF Author: Peter Singer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198821077
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Marx is one of the most influential philosophers of all time, whose theories about society, economics, and politics have shaped and directed political and social thought for 150 years. In this new edition, Peter Singer discusses the legacy and impact of Marx's core theories, considering how they apply to twenty first century politics and society.

The New Politics of Materialism

The New Politics of Materialism PDF Author: Sarah Ellenzweig
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 135197615X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature, and science, is the first to ask what is "new" about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary perspective.

Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction

Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction PDF Author: Charles T. Wolfe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319248200
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
This book provides an overview of key features of (philosophical) materialism, in historical perspective. It is, thus, a study in the history and philosophy of materialism, with a particular focus on the early modern and Enlightenment periods, leading into the 19th and 20th centuries. For it was in the 18th century that the word was first used by a philosopher (La Mettrie) to refer to himself. Prior to that, ‘materialism’ was a pejorative term, used for wicked thinkers, as a near-synonym to ‘atheist’, ‘Spinozist’ or the delightful ‘Hobbist’. The book provides the different forms of materialism, particularly distinguished into claims about the material nature of the world and about the material nature of the mind, and then focus on materialist approaches to body and embodiment, selfhood, ethics, laws of nature, reductionism and determinism, and overall, its relationship to science. For materialism is often understood as a kind of philosophical facilitator of the sciences, and the author want to suggest that is not always the case. Materialism takes on different forms and guises in different historical, ideological and scientific contexts as well, and the author wants to do justice to that diversity. Figures discussed include Lucretius, Hobbes, Gassendi, Spinoza, Toland, Collins, La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach and Priestley; Büchner, Bergson, J.J.C. Smart and D.M. Armstrong.

The Materialist Conception of History

The Materialist Conception of History PDF Author: G.V. Plekhanov
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1434463109
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description


After Hegel

After Hegel PDF Author: Frederick C. Beiser
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691173710
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half—when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period’s five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.

Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism

Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism PDF Author: Cat Moir
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004272879
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, Cat Moir offers a new interpretation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. The reception of Bloch’s work has seen him variously painted as a naïve realist, a romantic nature philosopher, a totalitarian thinker, and an irrationalist whose obscure literary style stands in for a lack of systematic rigour. Moir challenges these conceptions of Bloch by reconstructing the ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions of his speculative materialism. Through a close, historically contextualised reading of Bloch’s major work of ontology, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance), Moir presents Bloch as one of the twentieth century’s most significant critical thinkers.

The History of Philosophy

The History of Philosophy PDF Author: Alan Woods
Publisher: Wellred Books
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Alan Woods outlines the development of philosophy from the ancient Greeks, all the way through to Marx and Engels who brought together the best of previous thinking to produce the Marxist philosophical outlook, which looks at the real material world, not as a static immovable reality, but one that is constantly changing and moving according to laws that can be discovered. It is this method which allows Marxists to look at how things were, how they have become and how they are most likely going to be in the future, in a long process which started with the early primitive humans in their struggles for survival, through to the emergence of class societies, all as part of a process towards greater and greater knowledge of the world we live in. This long historical process eventually created the material conditions which allow for an end to class divisions and the flowering of a new society where humans will achieve true freedom, where no human will exploit another, no human will oppress another. Here we see how philosophy becomes an indispensable tool in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society.