Thomas J. Blakeley

Out from Under the Railroad Bridge: Sartre and the Soviets

More than one of the former students of Professor J. M. Bochenski remembers his seminars, in particular those on Sartre with their sessions at the cafe under the SBB bridge which spans the Gotteron Valley. In my case, the object of the seminar was Being and Nothingness of Sartre, and I can remember both hating Sartre and being incensed that we arrived at the end of the semester having read only the Introduction! The time since then has been spent both in reading the rest of Being and Nothingness and in coming to the realization that that reading of the Introduction contained all that one needs to understand Sartre.

The Dialectic of Nature

For a long time, “philosophy of nature” (Naturphilosophie) was a derogatory term in the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary.1 It applied to idealists like Schelling;2 whereas Marxist-Leninists were said to do science. By “philosophy of nature” we do not mean simply a philosophic account of nature, which every theoretical system has to contain in one form or another. Aristotelianism has a philosophy of nature (basically inherited by the neo-Thomists, as we will see in Chapter 7) but Aristotelianism is not merely a philosophy of nature. One could call the pre-Socratics, including the Eleatics, philosophers of nature in the strict sense. However, the paradigm of Western philosophy of nature is in the work of John Scotus Eriugena, Paracelsus and the German mystics like Boehme, some Renaissance thinkers, Spinoza, and Schelling. As such, it has been a constitutive part of what we might call “the other way of doing philosophy” and has interacted not only with the mainstream of Western thinking, but also with what we called in Chapter 1 the “underground religiosity” that never quite surfaced in the form of an official theology.

Person and society: A view of V. P. Tugarinov

ConclusionsWe can, in view of what we have said, ask if Tugarinov is doing a sort of structuralism; and, however we answer that question, one will want to know if he is doing something that can succeed, at least better than other moderns who have attempted a similar enterprise.The answer is that Tugarinov is doing a sort of (quasi-Aristotelian) structuralism — at least in the sense of refusing any absolute fixity to history, and of asserting a multi-level poly-directionality to the historical flow — an approach that suffers from most of the weaknesses of other such structuralisms.If Tugarinov succeeds better than other moderns — and we think that he does — this is because he refuses to make of historicism a relativism, maintaining a certain “categorial integrity” that is within history but not historical. In this he identifies with the best in the philosophic tradition; but it is not at all clear how he remains “Marxist”.

Bibliography of the Works by J. M. Bocheński 1961–1980

The following bibliography contains the scholarly publications of J. M. Bochenski that have appeared since 1961. A bibliography of his earlier works can be found in Contributions to Logic and Methodology: Essays in Honor of J. M. Bochenski, ed. by A. T. Tymieniecka and C. D. Parsons, Humanities Press, 1965.

Recent Soviet Evaluations of American Philosophy

It would, I suppose, not be good form to begin by saying there are no recent Soviet evaluations of American philosophy or, at least, none worth mentioning. The fact of the matter is, however, that Soviet mentions of American philosophy have been extremely rare over the past ten years. For example, of some 2700 items in Voprosy filosofit and Filosofskie nauki since 1968, only 60, or a little over 2%, have to do with American philosophy. And, none of these deal with classical American philosophy in the sense of Peirce, James and Dewey. Only three names occur more than once — Quine twice, Kuhn three times, and Marcuse twice — if the last can even be considered as belonging to “American philosophy”. It is clear that in Soviet philosophic journals, at least, more attention is paid to “philosophy in America” than to “American philosophy” in the classical sense. This is in stark contrast with German interest in Peirce and the international interest in James and phenomenology.

“Context” as a Philosophical Concept

While it is impossible to list all the categories operative in the pragmatic tradition, nonetheless the following seem to be the most important.1

The Scientific-Technological Revolution

When we call Marx’s own view of the social function of science and technology “humanist” we have in mind not only the contrast with the scientism of Engels, but also the more complex issue of Marx’s own understanding of science and technology as well as of the status of his work as scientific.

Logic and Knowledge

We have reviewed the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of a world governed by four types of causality. A complete account of anything (according to this theory) requires an explanation from the four different points of view. Our initial exposition of the neo-Thomist ethical theory of man, values, and society tried to embody this approach, as do our account of knowledge and of thought.

Nature and the Natural

Thus far, the general thrust of the present interpretation of American philosophy has been one of emphasis on the context, on the situation, from which a particular philosophy arises. It remains to define the metaphysical stance involved in the thought of James and Dewey, as well as the relationship of consciousness to reality. We will first delineate James’s notion of “radical empiricism” and “pure experience”, and subsequently Dewey’s portrayal of the relationship between “experience” and “nature”. While it is fair to term the outlooks “naturalistic” as opposed to a transcendentalist perspective, we shall see that the naturalism advocated is extremely rich and multi-dimensional.

Nature and Knowledge

The neo-Thomistic theory of man, value and society teaches that we know man’s social nature, made by God, to be patterned according to natural law to seek the common good. This theory has important epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions and implications, which were refined with the development of Scholastic precision and distinctions. The account is not philosophically innocent and one must try to see in more detail what is known, where we get knowledge, what shape it takes, what it is good for, and what we do to acquire knowledge.