Defending Materialism - by Katerina Kolozova & William Paul Cockshott & Greg Michaelson (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Defending Materialism is a monumental effort. Its commitment to leave hardly a stone unturned in its account of materialist thought from the classical to the contemporary age, paying equal attention to philosophy, science and logic, is, unmatched. The sheer breadth of the task reminds us that to honor, to defend, the scientificity of Marx's work requires reading science and philosophy with unstinting fidelity to the difficulty of each." --Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

"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

About the Author

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.