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

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and to the methodology of historical research and problems, such as the interpretation and the translation of historical documents.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

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and to the methodology of historical research and problems, such as the interpretation and the translation of historical documents.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.

Materialism

Materialism PDF Author: Robin Gordon Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429535376
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book

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.

The History of Materialism

The History of Materialism PDF Author: F.A. Lange
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317829913
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1133

Get Book

Book Description
This is Volume I of five in a series on Epistemology and Metaphysics. Originally published in 1865, this book offers the history of materialism and a criticism of its present importance in that period of time, presented in three parts.

Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany

Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany PDF Author: F. Gregory
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401011737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
A comprehensive study of German materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century is long overdue. Among contemporary historians the mere passing references to Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Buchner as materialists and popularizers of science are hardly sufficient, for few individuals influenced public opinion in nineteenth-century Germany more than these men. Buchner, for example, revealed his awareness of the historical significance of his Kraft und Stoff in comments made in 1872, just seventeen years after its original appearance. A philosophical book which has undergone twelve big German editions in the short span of seventeen years, which further has been issued in non-German countries and languages about fifteen to sixteen times in the same period, and whose appearance (although its author was entirely unknown up to then) has called forth an almost unprecedented storm in the press, . . . such a book can be nothing ordinary; the world-calling it enjoys at present must be justified through its wholly special characteristics or by the merits of its form and content. ' Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner explicitly held that their materialism was founded on natural science. But other materialists of the nineteenth century also laid claim to the scientific character of their own thought. It is likely that Marx and Engels would have permitted their brand of materialism to have been called scientific, provided, of course, that 'scientific' was understood in their dialectical meaning of the term. Socialism, Engels maintained, had become a science with Marx.

The Crisis in Historical Materialism

The Crisis in Historical Materialism PDF Author: Stanley Aronowitz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816618361
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book

Book Description
Critical theorist Aronowitz (sociology, CUNY) contends that the centrality of cultural categories, as raised by the feminist, ecology, and racial freedom movements, among others, provides the crucial difference for the late industrial world, demanding a break from the dominant tendencies of Marxism to reduce causality to its economic features. Acidic paper. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction

Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction PDF Author: Charles T. Wolfe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319248200
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Get Book

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.

Materialism

Materialism PDF Author: Richard C. Vitzthum
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
This well-researched study traces the materialist hypothesis that all existence is an unbroken, material continuum from its origins in ancient Greece to modern times. Starting with Lucretius' great first-century-BC poem, The Nature of Things, it proceeds through Enlightenment materialism and Paul d'Holbach's masterpiece, The System of Nature, to 19th century materialism and Ludwig Buechner's epochal Force and Matter. It concludes by examining the 20th century literature of mind-brain materialism. Addressed to specialists and general readers alike, Vitzthum's interdisciplinary approach avoids technical jargon as it critically reviews the premises and literature of materialism from philosophical, historical, scientific, and literary perspectives.

History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance

History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance PDF Author: Friedrich Albert Lange
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Materialism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book

Book Description


In the Tracks of Historical Materialism

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism PDF Author: Perry Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy, Marxist
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Get Book

Book Description


Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism PDF Author: Nikolaĭ Bukharin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dialectic
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book

Book Description