Can anyone who is more well read tell me if there is any philosophy work that revises the theory of dialectical materialism in light of modern scientific advances? I just finished Elementary Principles of Philosophy (FLP edition) which was extremely enlightening but some of the scientific examples are dated and it got me thinking. Physics (and all sciences for that matter) has advanced quite a bit in the past fifty years and I'd love to read a principled critique/investigation/discussion on how our current understanding of nature modifies our understanding of materialism. Also if there are any critiques of idealism in the understanding of modern science
Physics...has advanced quite a bit in the past fifty years.
Not really. Most of the groundwork for filling out the Standard Model was already around by the 1970's. Quantum field theories and their first fulfillment in QED were developed concurrently with quantum mechanics, not solely afterwards. The field remains a mess of models with conflicting philosophical consequences in lack of a more cohesive abstract framework. String theory is essentially a dead end. You can't build a string theory that could possibly resemble the standard model without supersymmetry, and I'm willing to say that supersymmetry is dead. We have not found a single superpartner and we're running out of reasonable experimental parameter spaces. Dark matter still doesn't have enough relevant particle physics data to inspire a paradigm shift. Quantum computers are an engineering question, the physics is simple quantum mechanics and fabricating precise systems that have convenient quantum properties. That's hard but not metaphysical. I don't think there are any answers in the contemporary pursuit of science that offer any philosophical inspiration to the advancement of historical science in the form of dialectical/historical materialism.
Yeah, something is deeply wrong with the Standard Model/GR synthesis but we've got nothing and I don't think Hegel is gonna get us out of it, even turned on it's head.
I don't mean to imply that somehow dialectical materialism will find a theory of everything. What I am wondering is how, if at all, does our current understanding of nature modify our understanding of dialectical materialism. Both QM/QED and GR are highly predictive theories and we have been able to use the models (however inaccurate) to make material advances in scientific knowledge. Saying that they are in disagreement and so tell us nothing about dialectical materialism seems idk lazy? Like Newtonian mechanics also has its limitations but the advances made there did relate to the conception of materialism at the time. Materialist philosophers decomposed everything into series of machines that produced motion but were essentially static in nature since their motion would eventually circle back and produce the same result. At that time the concept of matter and energy were separate but now we know that they are fundamentally inseparable from each other, and we have harnessed this knowledge to devastating result.
I guess my time frame should have been extended more than 50 years, but basically from my view "modern" physics requires a modern evaluation of dialectical materialism. From Engels Feuerbach "With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, it [materialism] has to change its form..." So then the question is whether advances in QED and GR are "epoch-making" or is dialectical materialism stalled in the early 20th century?
So, Engles is correct here, and with the development of the Standard model Dialectical Materialism had to develop, as did all philosophies of science. Primarily, this involved the incorporation of probabilistic methodologies (DM being as prone to things like more developed versions of Raven's Paradox as Positivism is) whereas before you could abstract DM as kind of the sum-over vector of various contradictions.
Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, post QED we've kind of stalled, a lot of particle/condensed matter physics progress has been made, and our observational data is way way better, but String theory, alternatives like LQG, and even our current understanding of Dark Matter/Dark Energy look like dead ends. Also the end of the USSR stalled most DM research, at least in the west.
In China an over-reliance on DM has the smell of the excesses of the second stage of the Cultural Revolution (where revolutionaries with only modest understanding of physics and DM tried to force professors to recant General Relativity and similar under threat of death.), though I believe there might be active programs remaining, and there certainly are in Vietnam
Do you have any sources on the cultural revolution and the renunciation of GR? I remember reading that in the Three Body Problem but honestly just assumed it was mostly BS. I can see how having a poor understanding of DM could lead to an idealist view in which dogmatic adherence to DM places it before scientific knowledge/understanding of matter. I don't think I fully understand how GR is incompatible with DM but I also got a D in that class lol
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/wps-2016-0008/html
Here is one, basically it's all fucking Zhdanov's fault, like so many cringe things about Socialist Art and Science. I have a translation of the Ju and Xu article in hardcopy around here somewhere gestures at pile of books.
Unfortunately, the Cultural Revolution events in the TBP actually happened, though they're a bit over-dramatised.
I'm more familiar with Biological uses (where it's a foundation of the development of punctuated equilibrium...which is less a theory than a useful frame of thinking IMO) Most Dialectic Work is in pure PhilSci, for obvious reasons.
Before the collapse of the USSR though much work was put into showing that quantum mechanics cannot be approached via positivism and requires a dialectic approach, but I have no idea if anyone still works on this, maybe in China.
I assume you've read most of the relevant 1st year PhilSci groundwork (Lakatos and Feyerbend, Magala, Lefebvre for various dialectic and leftist perspectives. Carnap's Philosophical Foundations of Physics and Popper/Khun for Naive Materialism and Deeply Wrong Just-So Stories respectively.)
E. Mc Mullin is not a Marxist but (Hegelian) dialectical methods strongly influences his thinking, and the Scientific Realists more generally use something that looks an awful lot like Dialectical Materialism if you squint at it. Well worth a look.
Thanks for the recommendations! I have not read any of those works actually, I am very new to philosophical studies having read the work mentioned above, Stalin's dialectical and historical materialism, and a mishmash of other things mostly related to the climate or politics. I have a degree in chemistry and physics though which is why I was thinking about these things. The philosophy of science is sorely lacking in university level science programs, but I doubt they would handle them well anyways.
One of the Unis I went to had a very good PhilSci department and all science students had to take 2 classes.
Desperately needed since most Scientists are actually Verificationists when you ask how they work but Popper pushed Falsificationism so hard that everyone just repeats his bullshit as "What Science is".
EDIT, if you are completely new, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_This_Thing_Called_Science%3F
as an intro to non-Soviet PhilSci and the basic issues. Also The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Has just about all the summary of any conceivable topic a layperson needs, with primary sources.
DiaMet is a method of understanding the material world as a whole, historical materialism is DiaMet applied to human society, and the process of class struggle emerges from a historical materialist analysis of society. But DiaMet is theorized to apply to all material processes, which is why people like Engles looked for patterns of development within evolution and astrophysics to develop basic principles for understanding human history
Based on what I've read dialectical materialism is more a philosophy of understanding the world. Materialism is the belief that matter exists independent of thought and that we can know the world as it is and not just as sense impressions. Dialectics is the acknowledgement that all matter and energy is in constant motion and transformative processes. They extend beyond the realm of the political thought, but I do agree that Marxism is mainly interested in how the method is applied to society.
I guess my question is not about how can we use dialectical materialism to interpret elementary particles/forces but the opposite. How does our understanding of these systems change our understanding of dialectical materialism? Maybe it doesn't but the most recent discussion of it I had found before posting this was Lenin's empirio-criticism and he was talking about the ether lol
I know just the leftist project that pertains to building a dialectical model for math and science, but it has the following drawbacks:
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It's not scientifically rigorous
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It's actually just an Isaac Asimov and Foundation series fan club in disguise
spoiler
dialectics.org
edit: but at the very least it has a lot of neat quotables
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