My review is part of a much larger project, which has to do with te relation of logic and reality, and beyond that, the fragmentation of knowledge under conditions of alienation. That would be the "marxist" angle that iunterests me, rather than advocacy of 'Marxism' per se. Graham Priest is far more interesting than Sean Sayers was at the time of the debate in question. But let's review the logic of my intervention. ^^^^ CB: Good to see some statements of your larger project. What is the difference between paraconsistent logic and dialectics or aspects of dialectics. I welcome paraconsistent logic efforts as steps by formal logicians to develop dialectical logic more in formal logical "terms", if that is what paraconsistent logical thinking is. ^^^^^ Priest's book (1995, 2002) BEYOND THE LIMITS OF THOUGHT doesn't mention Marx or Marxism, though Hegel emerges as the hero of the book. We also know from Priest's earlier two essays in SCIENCE & SOCIETY that he is a Marxist or has a keen interest in Marxism. Furthermore, he is one of those rare individuals in the English-speaking world with an interest in both dialectics and formal logic. So it is important to see how he seeks to unite the two. But oddly--and this part of my larger purview--he doesn't seem to have a whoe lot to say about dialectics (or about the vcarious philosophies he treats later) except to make his one big pitch for paraconsistent logic which offers a formalism for incorporating contradictions. But what good is this formalism in terms of modeling reality in a substantive fashion? I can't tell. And this, it seems to me, Priest merely reproduces the conditions of alienated theoretical labor and fails to overcome fragmentation and to unify an understanding of how logic relates to other philosophical issues and to objective reality itself. His grasp of formal logic should make him far more sophisticated than the dialectical materialists of old, but he seems bent on making the same trivial points. ^^^^^ CB: There is this paradox that both formal logic , in say the identity principle, and dialectics, in elementary processes, have trivial aspects. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
