Engels was, course, quite right to debunk belief in ghosts and mediums. In fact there were some political reasons behind this. At the time that Engels wrote this, spiritualism was quite popular within the IWMA, especially in the US and UK. In the US, one of the leading figures in the IWMA, Victoria Woodhull, was also a famous medium, whom both Marx & Engels very much disapproved of (perhaps unfairly).
On the other hand, it should also be pointed out that Engels does go off the rails on a few points in his essay. Engels poked fun of the idea of a fourth dimension. But even in his day, n-dimensional geometries were already quite well established and respectable. Later on, physicists like Albert Einstein would show that such geometries could be useful for understanding aspects of physical reality. Engels poked fun of the notion of imaginary numbers, that is numbers that were derived from the square root of -1. But both imaginary numbers and complex numbers were already, in Engels's time, a quite respectable part of mathematics. And physicists and engineers were already using them in analyzing such things as wave phenomena, for instance. While Engels generally had a good grasp of the science of his day, he was behind the times in his understanding of mathematics (he was also deficient in his understanding of the latest work on the foundations of the calculus) and that led him to making a few whoppers in his writings. His assertion that empiricism was lacking the intellectual resources for battling belief in the paranormal is open to question too. Probably the most important critique of belief in miracles ever written was David Hume's essay, "Of Miracles," (http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/14.html). Hume, of course, was an empiricist philosopher. If Engels wished to show the inadequacies of empiricism as a basis for refuting the paranormal, then he should have discussed Hume's essay and showed where Hume went wrong. Jim Farmelant -- "Charles Brown" <charl...@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote: Engels’ Dialectics of Nature http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch10.htm Natural Science and the Spirit World[1] T ____________________________________________________________ Click here to find the right business program for you and take your career to the next level. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/PnY6rw1UFte6Gs1QHlNzmzloOuJ9Ur0FG1ThDK2aLQMJDl716W3AV/ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
