Overview

Nobody doubted that atoms were real once atomic energy was developed, but in the early 20th-century and before their existence was widely doubted. Defending Materialism follows the political and theoretical background of this intense philosophical controversy, defending atomistic and mechanical materialism against idealist paradigms. These accounts range from the explicit idealism criticised by Lenin and Einstein to the implicit Hegelian idealism that influenced Soviet dialectical materialism. Following several key threads, the authors trace how the idea of atoms has changed over the centuries, how ideology has influenced both sides of the idealism/materialism divide, and how the nature of time in physics, biology and human society can give a fresh view of historical materialism. Starting from the origins of materialism in ancient Greek thought and moving through its revival in Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin gives a full picture of the links between the Marxist tradition and the ‘coarse materiality’ to which the worlds of science and philosophy have found themselves both subscribed and averse.

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9781350447325

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This is an important contribution to debates around both materialist and idealist oppositions and the specificities of materialist philosophy and analysis. The genealogical focus on the atom and atomism, tracing its history from the Greeks through Marx and Hegel to contemporary mathematical foundations of radical critique, makes a significant and important addition to debate from a defence of atomistic and mechanical materialism. * Paul Reynolds, Associate Lecturer, Open University, UK *

Author Information

Greg Michaelson is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Katarina Kolozova is senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, North Macedonia. Paul Cockshott is a Marxist economist and computer scientist, formerly Reader in Computing Science University of Glasgow, Scotland.

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