Thanks for the information
I've been waiting for access to this information for a long time
Victor Friedlander-Rakocz
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Farmelant" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 18:24
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Frederick Choate on L.I. Akselrod and
AbramDeborinRalph
On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 10:41:19 -0400 "Charles Brown"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
rdumain
-clip- Wasn't there some association between the Hegelian Deborites
and
non-Pavlovian, anti-reductionist Soviet psychologists in the 1920s?
^^^^^^
I suspect that Vygotsky would probably have been
influenced by Deborin and his disciples.
He certainly saw himself as developing a
dialectical, anti-reductionist psychology.
The Soviet psychologists like Vygotsky,
Lenontiev, Rubenshtein, Luria, etc. saw
psychology as a science that was in a crisis,
analogous to the crisis that Lenin had described
in his *Materialism and Empirio-Criticism* as
afflicting the natural sciences. The
crisis in psychology was seen as emerging
from a contradiction between the materialist
outlook that was associated with experimental
psychology, and the idealism which bourgeois
psychology retained from the philosophies
of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant.
The writings of Wundt, the father of modern
psychology were seen as exemplifying this
contradiction. Therefore, early Soviet psychologists
were more than willing to give a fair hearing to
psychologies that challenged Wundt's
introspectionism including
both John B. Watson's behaviorism and
Gestalt psychology. Watson's work was look
favorably upon because he was seen as attempting
to articulate a materialist psychology. Watson
was invited to write an article on behaviorism for
the *Large Soviet Encyclopedia*. Gestalt psychology
was treated favorably at first because it was
seen as an attempt at developing a dialectical
psychology. A little later on, Soviet psychologists
initiated attempts at developing their own
psychological theories which were they hoped
would be consistent with basic Marxist principles
such as the materialist conception of history and
Lenin's analysis of reflection. Thus
American behaviorism was ultimately rejected
as being mechanistic and positivistic
while Gestalt psychology was rejected
as idealist. Nevertheless, they were recognized
as having made important contributions
which had to be absorbed into a psychology
that was firmly grounded in dialectical
materialism.
I have since read enough of Pavlov to know that he
and his disciples took pains to emphasize
the dialectical character of their work but
then again, the Mechanists had likewise
took pains to assert the dialectical
character of their views too. In
the late Stalin period when the debate
over cybernetics broke out, both
sides of the debate accused each other
of falling into mechanistic materialism
while each side asserted the dialectical
character of their own
views.
Despite the efforts of Stalin
to settle the debate between mechanists
and dialecticians by fiat, the underlying
issues never went away and kept
reappearing in Soviet thought up to
the very end. And that should be no
surprise since these represented
some of the fundamental issues
that are posed by Marxism.
CB: Jim says something on this:
"It is also interest that the issues underlying the debate between
the
mechanists and the Dialecticians appeared in other disciplines as
well such
as in Soviet psychology. The reflexology of Ivan Pavlov can be seen
as
representing a mechanist approach to psychology in which behavior
was
broken down into reflexes - both unconditioned and conditioned. In
contrast
the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky attempted to construct a
psychology
directly from the premisses of dialectical materialism. He developed
Genetic approach to the development of concepts in early childhood
and
youth, tracing the transition through a series of stages of human
development, based on the development of the child's social
practice. His
work eventually impacted Western psychology especially through his
influence on the thought of Jean Piaget. However, under Stalin
Vygotsky's
work was considered to be heretical while Pavlov's work became the
basis
for official Soviet psychology. Indeed, in the later years of
Stalin's
regime, it was made the official Soviet psychology and most other
schools
were suppressed. Thus, while mechanism was rejected as a general
philosophical outlook, it was embraced in psychology."
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
[email protected]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
[email protected]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
[email protected]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
