Reviews for Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History

The average rating for Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-21 00:00:00 Gary Copnell A Difficult Survey Of Process Philosophy Most Western philosophy has taken substance or "thingness" as the basic component of reality and as the object of philosophical study. Reality is said to consist of objects existing, for the most part, in space, with God conceived, for theists, as a sort of non-spatial "thing" or "object". In the 20th Century, some philosophers challenged the emphasis on substance in philosophy and argued instead for a philosophy based on process. Alfred North Whitehead is the thinker most often associated with process philosophy, but the school is broader than Whitehead with strong historical antecedents. Born in Germany, Nicholas Rescher (b. 1928) has spent most of his life in the United States as University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. A prolific author of over 100 books, Rescher has written extensively on process philosophy. Rescher's thought is difficult to categorize with all his writing. Besides process philosophy, it shows the strong influence of the closely-related school of American pragmatism and of German idealism. Rescher practices systematic philosophy in the grand manner rather than the scientifically-based analytical philosophy of the 20th Century United States. Rescher's short book, "Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues" (2000) is a philosophically sophisticated introduction to process philosophy for students and readers with a philosophical background. The book follows-up Rescher's earlier book, "Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy" (1977). Process philosophy is notoriously difficult to present and understand. This difficulty is immediately apparent in Rescher's book. The opening chapters offer a broad introduction to the goals and nature of process philosophy and are the strongest part of the book. Rescher traces to sources of process thinking from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus through Leibniz, through the American pragmatists Peirce and James, to Henri Bergson and Whitehead. In the opening chapter, "The Promise of Process Philosophy", Rescher helpfully list five key propositions of process philosophy which are worth reproducing for to give a quick overview for purposes of a review. 1. Time and change are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding. 2. Process is a principal category of ontological description. 3. Processes are more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental than things for the purposes of ontological theory. 4. Several, if not all, of the major elements of the ontological repertoire (God, Nature as a whole, persons, material substances) are best understood in process terms. 5. Contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity are among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding. A bit later in the book, Rescher defines "process" as "an actual or possible occurrence that consists of an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination; an orchestrated series of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally." Rescher's own process thinking is heavily scientifically and mathematically oriented. He stresses that process philosophy is more of a programme than a teaching and that philosophers have barely scratched the surface in articulating what it involves. The breadth and promise of process thinking make it challenging while contributing as well to its difficulty and obscurity. In a chapter called "The Revolt against Process", Rescher clarifies the nature of process philosophy by contrasting it with the analytic philosophy still prevalent in the United States. He discusses some of the works of leading thinkers such as Quine and Strawson by showing how their commitment to "things" as the basic component of philosophical thought differs from a process view. Beyond this opening material, much of the book becomes increasingly frustrating and difficult to follow. In particular, Rescher offers extended discussions of human agency and of cognitive process and the scientific method. Much of this material is interesting in itself. I frequently lost the thread of the discussion and was unable to understand how Rescher's presentation related to "process" thinking as opposed to its alternatives. In other words, steps seemed to me to be missing from the opening presentation to these somewhat more specific materials. The book became hazy and disjointed. The final three chapters return to a broader approach as Rescher discusses metaphysical realism and appears to endorse it with an idealistic/processual twist. This is a challenging discussion which struck me in my reading as of difficult consistency with process thinking as set forth earlier in the book. Rescher proceeds to offer a strong critique of historical and other relativistic thinking from the standpoint of process philosophy. The book concludes with a discussion of Leibniz and his monadology showing its close connection to process thinking. The discussion also shows the highly rationalistic character of much of process philosophy. Without explicitly so saying, Rescher's exposition appears in my reading to commit him to a strong form of what is known as the principle of sufficient reason that Leibniz develops. This principle of metaphysical rationalism would need explanation and defense beyond anything in Rescher's presentation in this book. I struggled with this book, but in the end I thought I new something more of process philosophy than I did before reading it. It is daunting. The commitments to systematic philosophy and pragmatism in process philosophy accord with some of my philosophical dispositions. I have encountered some of the teachings of this school elsewhere and less difficultly put. I will probably try to read further. Those wishing to study process thinking learn quickly of the difficult path that lies ahead. Robin Friedman

Review # 2 was written on 2017-12-15 00:00:00 Gregory Martiensen Although eight years separate one's two readings of this book, one found in its second reading a greater navigational aid in one's intellectual explorations than in the first. For example and fittingly, one found oneself at sea with Moby-Dick, and intrigued or rather confused by the binary constellations of Locke/Kant and the swirling Milky Way of Cartesian Vortices, one followed (after reading about the philosophies of Locke, Kant, and Descartes) Ishmael's advice and dumped these "thunder-heads" into the sea. That left the stars of Emerson and his essay, "Experience", and Stanley Cavell's collection of essays on Emerson gathered in a volume titled, "Emerson's Transcendental Etudes" to steer by. And appropriate to the notion of experience (and navigation) it was the sense of sight that proved crucial here. On the cover of Cavell's collection there appears a blurry, vague humanish image walking on a sea shore (perhaps). Citing Cavell citing Emerson's "Experience" the cover image illustrates Emerson's phrase, the "evanescence and lubricity of all objects." (Cavell, 146) So, one leaps to link this suggestive phrase with Ishmael's, "the ungraspable phantom of life." (Melville, Ch 1) So, to the point, "Where do we find ourselves?" After reading "Process Philosophy" one finds oneself, as the rapture of the particulars in Ishmael's cetology chapters suggest, always becoming, always weaving oneself.