Reviews for Marxism and Morality: A Critical Examination of Marxist Ethics

The average rating for Marxism and Morality: A Critical Examination of Marxist Ethics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-17 00:00:00 Amos Tuttle Just who was this Leibniz? When I read philosophy, rightly or wrongly, I always want to make the thinker in question into a literary character, and Leibniz offers plenty of fodder in that regard. In his unflagging industry and optimism, he may seem to represent the rising bourgeoisie, but then there is clearly something baroque and premodern in his thought. I guess he's sometimes viewed as boring, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Compared to the dull, plodding nature of Kant, Leibniz's frenetic energy is something to behold (incidentally, William T. Vollmann, an author near and dear to many on goodreads, uses epigraphs from Leibniz in at least a couple of his early books -the Butterfly Stories and the Atlas, quotes which seem to be chosen for their strange, not-entirely-intentional humor). If you read, say, the letters to Arnauld you may be impressed by the sense that, far from having a rigid system, he's making this shit up as he goes. Unfortunately, it's also true Leibniz is not very approachable. There's no clear place to start. His writings are vast and often contradict each other. His one finished book, the Theodicy, was written in the hopes of winning a mass audience, and he may not have ever really believed all that he put in it. This collection of essays by contemporary scholars is inevitably a bit dry at times. I myself am not an academic. I can appreciate good scholarship, but the finer points of interpretation and textual fidelity don't concern me as much. In my view, studying Leibniz shouldn't be like reconstructing the way of life of a completely isolated island civilization. I'm interested in those flash points that can be reactivated and ultimately integrated into one's own understanding of the world. No doubt this is a tall order. To be frank, most of Leibniz is simply beyond me at the moment, but I'm trying. The spirit is willing. * 'Philosophy and Language in Leibniz' by Donald Rutherford; overall a decent essay, but I have to question professor Rutherford's comments on the monadology: "We read that every monadic substance is a 'mirror' of the universe... moreover, soul-like monads are located everywhere 'within' matter, with the result that nature is everywhere alive. It is easy to be misled by language like this and to conclude that Leibniz's language is far stranger, and far less credible, than it actually is... [Leibniz's readers] have misread the figurative for the literal, and in so doing have transformed a metaphysics of reason into an implausible fantasy." First, it's not clear to me if Rutherford thinks these terms do have a literal referent; is he saying Leibniz is getting carried away with poetic language when he really means to say something relatively straightforward? If so, then what is this straightforward, 'credible' thing he means to say? Rutherford doesn't appear to have an answer. I'm inclined to think there's just no getting around the strangeness of monads. Literally they don't exist, but they may help us think in new ways. Secondly, it seems to me that Rutherford's last two terms aren't mutually exclusive; reason can lead to some very strange places, and a metaphysics of reason may well become a wild, implausible fantasy. That wonderful Deleuze quote is appropriate: "Nor is it certain that it is only the sleep of reason which gives rise to monsters: it is also the vigil, the insomnia of thought..." (from Difference & Repetition) Leibniz was one of Deleuze's favorites, and perhaps no philosopher has ever better exemplified this quality, the 'insomnia of thought.' (If we believe, as Leibniz believed, that every individual, & each proper name, is also a concept, then there is no end to concepts; logic no longer stops at the level of species, but becomes an infinite, obsessive task) * Is existence a predicate? (perhaps no good can come from such questions, & yet onward to madness I gambol) Kant emphatically rejected the ontological argument, and thus helped pave the way for a philosophy that was fully secular without necessarily being atheistic. Spinoza has the odd distinction of being the philosopher who relied most heavily on the ontological argument AND of being perhaps the first full-fledged modern atheist. Apparently, however, Kant did not kill the argument for good: "The time has long since past, however, when one could summarily dismiss the idea of a necessary being on Kantian grounds. A number of philosophers now argue that existence is a predicate and many others hold that, though existence is not a predicate, necessary existence is" - from 'Leibniz's ontological and cosmological arguments,' David Blumenfeld, pp 372-73 (I believe this was written in the 1990's) * One of the key differences between Leibniz and Spinoza, perhaps, is that Spinoza denies the existence of contingent truths. Everything that is exists because it's logically necessary that it exist (at least this is one plausible reading of the Ethics). By contrast, the assertion that this is the best of all possible worlds means that other worlds could have been. So then Spinoza would seem to be the more extreme rationalist. Leibniz's position certainly appears to be more intuitive. In our daily interactions with the world we all behave as though things could be different than they are. Philosophy can notoriously lead to some bizarre conclusions - denying time, the external world, even other minds; the fact that they're bizarre doesn't necessarily mean they're false, but I think we're right to be skeptical of conclusions that fly so much in the face of our common sense understanding of the world. I also wonder if this conflicts with Spinoza's reputation as the first modern atheist. Most forms of modern, scientistic atheism tend to hold that the universe is radically contingent. It could just have easily been very different, or not exist at all; human life could just as easily have not evolved. It's all blind, pointless luck.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-23 00:00:00 Deidre Ashton One of the better Cambridge Companion editions. Rutherford's section on the late period metaphysics was very helpful to me.