Justin E. H. Smith

Biological Knowledge, Cosmological Context, and the Question of Non-Western Science

(Presented to the James Bay Research Group, McGill University, Spring, 2007)

There is a cluster of questions, of interest to philosophers and anthropologists alike, concerning the relationship of literal to metaphorical discourse, the uniqueness of scientific rationality among ways of conceptualizing the world, and the tension between absolutism and relativism.  Philosophers tend to assume that these problems can be worked out without stepping back from the culture that itself generated them. It seems to me however that if philosophers wish either to critique or to defend and promote scientific rationality, they are going to have to dare to look closely at the sort of practices with which it supposedly contrasts.

One way of stepping back from one’s own culture and getting a broader view is that of the historian.  Historians of ancient philosophy and science --unlike, for the most part, historians of the early modern period-- have in general been more ready to acknowledge that the past is, as is said, a foreign country, and consequently have been ready to look at the origins of Western thought in context, with an eye to just how much what has been called ‘the Greek miracle’ in fact overlapped with other, pre-Greek, supposedly merely mythological systems of thought in other eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures.  For G. E. R. Lloyd, to the extent that there was a ‘Greek miracle’ at all, this was a matter of a growing concern to distinguish between the different criteria for truth in different registers of speech, with an ultimate preference for the most literal register.  Thus Aristotle criticizes earlier philosophers, most often Empedocles, for saying things that may be, as he puts it, “acceptable for the purposes of poetry,” but not strictly speaking true.   One important component of the modern scientific revolution was already in place in ancient Greece, then: the distinction between literal and metaphorical claims, and the valorization of the former at the expense of the latter.  The former have the final say, whereas the latter are at best of use in certain local, circumscribed contexts.

Polish Polyvalence and the Spectre of Dialectics in Soviet Formal Logic Under Stalin

Until Lenin’s death in 1924, philosophy  in the Soviet Union was pluralistic, with battling factions —dialecticians, mechanicists, even orthodox Christians— hoping to win out over one another by force of persuasion.  By the 1930s, the sundry sects encouraged by Lenin had been denounced by Stalin as so much “menshevizing idealism,” and certain, carefully selected, easily comprehensible, and empirically unfalsifiable fragments of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, in particular segments of the Dialektik der Natur, were enshrined as a form of state religion.  Between 1925 and 1928, Stalin did his very best to learn the basics of dialectical materialism, as understood by his forebears, and even of the Hegelian idealist dialectics that had been ‘stood on its head’ by his Marxist successors, while nonetheless, true to the spirt of Aufhebung, in  a certain respect preserved.  Stalin even retained the services of a tutor, I. E. Spet, to teach him the basics of Hegel’s philosophy, but in the end, discouraged by its abstruseness, dispatched his court philosopher to Siberia.  Stalin’s confusion concerning the true character of dialectical philosophy led to no small confusion among the logicians active in Stalin’s USSR.  In particular, there was a great deal of uncertainty concerning the law of the excluded middle and its dispensability.  On Stalin’s rough understanding of dialectical logic, prima facie contradictions resolve themselves in higher order syntheses, and the old Aristotelian devotion to bivalence in logic seemed for that reason regressively undialectical.  Lukasiewicz and his Soviet successors such as Bochvar, then, were seen in the 1930s to be, as it were, dialectically correct.  By the 1940s, however, polyvalence would be ferociously denounced by A. A. Zhdanov, Stalin’s culture minister, as a tool of quantum mechanics, itself a mere expression of bourgeois subjective idealism.  In this paper, I sketch out the fate of non-classical logic, in particular the polyvalent logic of Lukasiewicz, in the Soviet Union under Stalin.  I maintain that the history of the reception of non-classical logic is instructive in any effort to discern the ever-changing, and ever more crude, understanding of the dialectical tradition in officially sanctioned Soviet philosophy.