The Head-Up, Non-Specialist, Theoretical approach?

The Necessary Role of Philosophy in Science

On reading a collection of short articles under the general title of The Unknown Genome in New Scientist (2765), I realised that I had perhaps hit pay-dirt with regard to my own ideas on the possible policing of genetic materials within all organisms.

I found, in this series, substantial evidential support for some of the hypotheses I have been formulating about this area, particularly in the maintenance and policing of the genetic material (though, of course, my considerations were, perhaps surprisingly, almost wholly philosophical).

NOTE: A fuller discussion of the content of the above mentioned series in New Scientist will be addressed in a separate paper on completion of this one.

I am no professional biologist, and I must depend wholly on those who are, for the content that I must attempt to make sense of. So, I hadn’t arrived at my suggestions via personally-newly discovered concrete evidence, but, on the contrary, solely in response to my dissatisfaction with the usual consensus explanations of Mutation and Species Change, and involving possible alternative accounts of my own.

The usual explanations were much too hit and miss, and as is usually the case, often latched onto the ubiquitous use of Randomness to “explain” everything!

No, I was convinced that Life would immediately and vigorously react to mutation damage to its absolutely vital genetic materials, and hence, apart from Natural Selection of the adult phenotype, other processes would occur within the genotype to remove, alleviate, or “wrap-up” and store any genetic damage, which, by some set of criteria was labelled as wholly deleterious.

I must admit that while I am not a biologist, I have always been very interested in all aspects of the subject, and have followed developments closely. I have never been taught the subject at any level, and my experimental experience was, and still is, is precisely NIL.

But I am by no means un-informed. I have been reading extensively on this subject for over 40 years, not to mention on many other very wide-ranging areas, and was indeed extensively educated as a scientist and mathematician, prior to changing my specialisms several times, and even achieving a professorial appointment in one of these latter areas.

So, what is it that I must have been doing to now attempt to integrate such state of the art discoveries into my own propositions?

The resonance between what these real biologists were finding and my suggestions as to what I considered were necessary processes have been surprisingly close. The usual response to such a person as myself making any worthwhile contribution at all on such a specialist subject is universally agreed to be of minimal value.

But such a reaction is not always justified.

And this same situation has occurred several times for me in widely different disciplines. It has even occurred within my legitimate disciplines of Physics and Mathematics, because I was “making judgements well outside my specialist areas”. More expected similar responses have been coming my way in many other areas from Painting and Sculpture to even Dance at one extreme to Geology, Politics and Pedagogy on another. Yet, though such condemnations would usually be correct, they will not always be so. It will depend on how such a wide range of subjects are considered by the outside interloper.

It will most certainly depend on his ground! In other words it will be basically determined by how that person deals with knowledge and understanding from disparate areas: it will depend on his worldview.

Specialisation does indeed allow a remarkable focus to be achieved and discoveries to be made. It is, of course, essential for each and every serious area of study. But it is also invariably what I term a Head-Down approach. It limits the considerations of the expert to his/her own narrow area. And it must be contrasted with a Head-Up approach, which builds its worldview out of the widest possible Knowledge and Understanding.

It should really be the approach of the philosopher, but even there it is rarely the normal mode.

All problems, no matter what the specialism, will not be solved by concentrating only within that specialism. Indeed, along with the accumulated wisdom of that specialism, such a limitation will also justify and firmly embed in addition its current assumptions and errors. Many practitioners will never see the wood for the trees. And a generalist approach can, and sometimes does, reveal things invisible to the Head-Down expert.

A real philosopher MUST be multi-discipline, if he/she is to benefit from human gains across the board in understanding the World. All understanding is, of course, social, but it is also multi-discipline. Even the greatest specialist experts show almost unbelievable errors in their generalist thinking.

It is almost universally true that all specialists make rubbish philosophers. And they also cannot switch disciplines and produce as good work thereafter as they did in their own prior area.

To give an exemplar of this which may establish my own approach, I will relate the experience of my major diversion into Dance!

I have become the leading author of Multimedia Resources for the Teaching of Dance (along with an excellent Dance specialist colleague). And this situation was established some 21 years ago, and has remained the case ever since. In addition I also designed a teaching aid for Dance Teachers employing Rudolf Laban’s ideas in their area, and related to his famous Labanotation – the world-wide employed method for recording Dance. 

In that very different world, I became an expert in Computer Systems and Programming, not only producing that high point of systems design – a machine independent compiler, but finally achieved a post as Director of Information Technology in one of the colleges of the University of London. I had received zero instruction in computing also.

But, I was always a Head-Up philosopher, and every discipline was relevant to that! Recently I have been making significant contributions in the Theory of Emergences, as applied to the Origin of Life on Earth and to its subsequent Evolution.

Have I any right to tackle such problems? Many would tender an emphatic, “No!”, but they would also be mistaken.

In the last five years I have again changed course and spent all my time writing about Philosophy and now run an online Journal (SHAPE) concerned with Philosophy and it is full of new and legitimate ideas.

Now, at this point, the reader may well be yawning at “my efforts to show how clever I am”, but they would be mistaken if they are. I am, and purport to be no genius.

I got a lower second in Physics from Leeds University, and was throughout my education damned with the faint praise of “promising”. No, my descriptions of what I do are not to establish any sort of superiority, but, on the contrary, to reveal an approach that enables me to address such a very wide area of disciplines and to do something worthwhile in every one. It is because I am, and always have been, multi-discipline in my interests. NO! “Interests” is much too weak a word. I should have said “concerns”.

And though much of conventional education is to tell us HOW things happen, I always wanted to know WHY they happened the way that they did. 

AND I demanded (of myself) a philosophy that could face all ways, and cope with all expectations. After all, what is the use of a philosophy that is strictly limited to a specific discipline – as, for example, the current consensus in Sub-Atomic Physics – the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory and its various developments.

Not only should my philosophy be entirely general, but it should never be only an academic subject. 

As Robert Pirsig tried to insist in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Philosophy is for every day! It should illuminate your life and purposes, and it should never be second hand!

Though you may, and indeed frequently have to, take on what you learn from others, you must never be converted “hook, line and sinker” for most of what you “take on” as your position, you will not fully understand if you do.

But, if, on the other hand, what you learn from others must be integrate-able with what you already understand, it will be very different. It may be difficult to achieve such integration, but without it, you really have nothing new to take on.

What you have learnt cannot actually mean anything!

Of course, if your “core” is constant and immutable, you will also be in deep trouble! Integration is a two-way process, and its successful achievement changes the receiving “core”, and frequently the new material too. Indeed, the greatest understanding comes only from transcending what appears to be unbridgeable contradictions between what you already understand and what you are trying to integrate.

The reason for such an impasse is always that your usually-inviolate assumptions are incorrect, and the only way to traverse the seeming full-stop is by a radical change in those assumptions.

I have recently been fascinated by Evolution and have even written a paper entitled Truly Natural Selection, which generalised Darwin and Wallace’s Natural Selection to apply also to non-living, purely-chemical processes by means of a very different selection process.

My Theory of Emergences tackles the trajectory of Emergence Events such as the Origin of Life on Earth, NOT particularly, of course, but generally as a revolutionary interlude in the on-going Evolution of Reality. It concerns itself with the form or shape of the episode – its turnovers and consequent phases until there is some sort of resolution in the establishment of a wholly New Level.

What has therefore emerged is extremely surprising!

The assumption that minor constructive processes prior to such an Event actually precipitate a whole new Level determined by the direction of those prior processes is shown to be totally INCORRECT! The nature of the new Level does NOT emanate from changes in the prior Level at all. The only thing that within-Level processes can produce is a catastrophic collapse of the prior system, and that is very different indeed from the usual assumption. 

Indeed, it is ONLY the Second Law of Thermodynamics type sub-processes that bring about the demise of every Stable Level.

The first phase in an Emergence is the opposite of anything emerging: it is composed of a catastrophic collapse of the prior stability, which then seems to be hurling headlong down to total chaos.

But it doesn’t!

The dismantling of the stability-ensuring processes within the previous Level, plus its history and still-remaining, productive-process content, allows new things to occur, which within the stable Level were prohibited, and a brief period of remarkably diverse and numerous processes leads, by a selective process to the creation of entirely-new proto-systems. Nevertheless, these quickly generate their own Second Law curtailing, and this leads into a period of oscillations between creation and dissolution, which nevertheless gradually ascends to a point where a completely new and self-maintaining Level is established and PERSISTS!

It is no empty myth, when legend talks of the Phoenix arising from the flames of destruction.

That is the ONLY way that the wholly NEW can ever emerge!

The real myth is that which asserts that innovation can be achieved by small quantitative and incremental steps - it cannot.

Now, interestingly, my work on Emergences naturally progressed to seeing what their role must be in the actual Evolution of Life, and many questions immediately arose about our universally agreed assumptions of how new species emerged, and also how matter ascended from inert particles to produce Life, Humankind and indeed Consciousness. The incrementalist myth would just NOT suffice, for such a remarkable trajectory, and all our basic assumptions had to be thoroughly investigated.

My work in this area (remember I am NOT a biologist) has recently been confirmed by a whole series of unconnected discoveries by real experimental research biologists in the various academic Journals and Magazines.

The point of this paper is NOT self-congratulation, but instead to try to reveal why an ordinary man from a poor working-class background (my grandmother could neither read nor write) could be in a position to make such significant contributions.

It HAS to be important, and though it may dismay the elitists and the privileged, it should encourage all who really want to understand the World, rather than merely join-the-club, accept the consensus, and live comfortably.

But, the barriers to doing it are indeed considerable, I must admit! Such researches are MORE than a full time job and you have to earn your living.

I chose, and luckily it was the correct choice, to be a teacher, and have taught at every level of Education from lower schools to Universities. But to get anywhere I had to move fairly frequently. I had eight posts culminating in my Directorship at Goldsmiths’ College, and always tackling new things. 

At Goldsmiths’ I devised and commissioned the first Campus-wide Fibre-Optic Network in any of the Colleges of London University, while in Glasgow I had to turn myself into a systems expert to set up an appropriate teaching-orientated computer network and system for an educational institution at the highest level, and also to become an expert in Computers-in-Control to help many researchers with their chosen questions.

The thing is to tackle what needs doing, and learn as you go. Nevertheless, you do not have to have a goal from the start. It expands with each new job and the challenges they deliver. I seemed to arrive at a professorial level final post by a totally unplanned route. (Though I often spent very long periods in a given post, because the job demanded it).

But, what does happen is that as your achievements are your own, and never facilitated by contacts and influence, you gain in both reputation and confidence.

From an initially shy working class boy from West Gorton, Manchester, I am now a confident philosopher! How about YOU?

Interdisciplinary Research – Dance

What is to be Done: IV

The essential tasks for the Marxists of today

Many years later, I was developing Multimedia Resources for the Teaching of Dance (mostly Ballet and Modern Contemporary Dance). The main reason for this methodology was that we considered that the very best exemplars should be used at every level, and these could only be available in recordings. We also needed to intervene in any recording with perfect control plus easy and accurate access. A teacher HAD to be able to go directly to the movement she was teaching, and once at that moment to sensitively control its playing, with repeats and loops and slow motion. The DYNAMICS of each and every movement had to be precisely delivered, whatever way we were allowing its manipulation.

We therefore could NOT use Video Tape as the necessary access and control was too tedious and frankly impossible to effectively use. So we used Laser Disk technology. These contained a series of concentric tracks, each one containing a single 1/25th of a second frame. BUT, vitally these frames had been captured in an Analogue way. Moments from EVERY part of that 1/25th of a second were present within each and every frame. We had chosen Laser Disk for its controllability, but we had also chosen the ideal medium for delivering perfect movement dynamics.

We devised sophisticated and powerful Access & Control methods, which our users picked up in seconds and used with great power and subtlety to reveal the very essence of the movements.

The system worked like a dream and we won a British Interactive Video Award (BIVA) in Brighton in the Autumn of 1989.

The system worked extremely well, but we didn’t know why until we were required to do the same sort of processes using the “latest thing” – Digital Video. It turned out to be impossible!

I had to STOP the authoring of the new Multimedia Pack and find out why it didn’t work. I wonder if you can guess the reason for its inadequacy? It was Digital, hence though it still built movement out of 1/25th of a second frames, these were very different. They were each frozen STILLS. There were a series of such stills, each of which were held for 1/25th of a second and then replaced by the next still. All dynamics had been lost. Such a technology was fine for animation and fantasy, but Reality in movement was IMPOSSIBLE. After a long diversion researching the problem I was able to reveal the reasons for failure resided precisely in the “new” technology. It just could not cope with detailed analysis of movement. Indeed the movement NOT covered by the separate individual frames – indeed totally absent from the recording amounted to over 97%, and a fast moving hand could move (totally unrecorded) almost a yard between frames. I checked on sports events using digital cameras, and was amazed at the record of Paula Ratcliffe winning the New York marathon – there were only THREE positions of her arm in the record of a single swing, and, of course, such a movement was particularly slow. Imagine trying to study the dynamic detail in a delivery by a fast bowler with such an inadequate technology! Slow motion was a farce, and the dynamics of subtle movement always totally absent. No wonder it didn’t work!

You will have noticed, of course, the occurrence of the very same problem as I have mentioned several times already. Once again, we have a pragmatic solution to representing movement in terms of descrete moments – Descreteness was being used where Continuity turns out to be essential!

The information delivered by Digital Video for human vision and interpretation, which was to be used to recreate actual movement was clearly totally inadequate to the task. The only interpretations possible were crude and simplified extrapolations between inert stills.

But Dance, like Music is packed with subtle accelerations and decelerations, which deliver the Art involved, and these were crucially entirely absent!

So, why did the old alternative, Analogue Video, work so well, while Digital Video was useless?

Without going into the fairly complex detail of the results of my work, what I discovered was that elements from the whole of the 1/25th of a second duration of a frame were indeed present in the analogue version as a sort of “smeared still”. But, when you looked at such a frame in isolation, it appeared confusingly blurred and seemingly entirely useless. The Digital Frame in comparison was completely crisp and clear.

The universal consensus was (and still is) that ONLY the clear, focussed images available via Digital stills could facilitate the serious study of movement. And of course, in one respect they were correct. For while accurate, positional information could be extracted from a Digital Still, no such useable positions were possible from the smeared, Analogue alternative. But the myth was that widely spaced crisp positional information was sufficient to deliver the actual dynamics of the movement involved.

It wasn’t and never can be.

It was the age-old myth that precise numeric information is everything. In movement, that is never the case. The subtle variations in functional movement – the DYNAMICS – is what delivers the real content, and Analogue “smeared stills”, when delivered as a MOVIE, was the only way to deliver that. The very fact that each and every smeared still contained something from every moment of the frame period made it possible for the human Eye/Brain system to correctly interpret the movement. There can be no doubt that the analogue version was ideal for delivery in sequence, and also that our human facilities were ideally equipped to extract the maximum from that seemingly blurred and useless record.

I could go on and explain what could be delivered by slow motion, by looping and by many other techniques, but suffice it to say that on ALL these counts Digital was useless and Analogue was supreme.

Though, I have to admit, that I am in a minority of ONE in taking this position. The voluminous data from digital frames stills seduce the majority of “experts” in this field.

Do you recognise the SAME problem as we saw earlier in the Calculus and in Zeno’s Paradoxes?

It was, and is, the problem of Continuity and Descreteness once more!

Believe it or not, we solved the problem.

I will NOT burden you here with all the details, but suffice it to say that we, that the work led to the appropriate delivery of dynamics and even to the design of an entirely NEW camera for recording and studying movement, which I have called the Twin Movement Camera.

This may seem a long way from Marxism, but it is at the philosophical heart of it!

No-one else had even noticed what was being lost, and still the Digital avalanche continues unabated, and experts use Digital cameras to analyse movement in Sport and many other areas without discovering the inadequacy of their chosen means.

In contrast, a Marxist working alone, without either funds or facilities, cracked the problem, while literally thousands of scientists working in this field world-wide have failed to do so.

The legacy of this research continues in the current work by Bedford Interactive, and their pioneering software FORMotion.

If you think that the correct interpretation of movement in Ballet is resoundingly unimportant, may I change tack completely and go on to questions concerning the Nature of Reality and the universally accepted methods of Science to further my case?

This post is the fourth in a new blog series entitled "What is to be done?" on the crises in both Marxism and Science, and how a revolution is necessary in both. This body of work will eventually be published in Shape Journal as a Special Issue. Watch this space!

This post is the fourth in a new blog series entitled "What is to be done?" on the crises in both Marxism and Science, and how a revolution is necessary in both. This body of work is AVAILABLE NOW as a Special Issue. Read it all here!

Real Marxism? It is a Philosophy.

There are today many people in left-wing politics, who say that they are Marxists. But, what do they mean by it?

For decades after the Russian Revolution, it was that Event, which guaranteed their stance. It was, after all, the ONLY successful socialist revolution, and had most certainly been led by followers of Karl Marx, after his central theoretical role in the establishment of both the First and the Second Internationals.

But, what was it that made Marx’s position both entirely appropriate and unique?

Activists had been calling themselves Socialists for many decades before Marx, but he started from a very different place to almost all of them. He started as a philosopher; a follower of the Idealist, Frederick Hegel, and his conversion to that standpoint was achieved by the truly tremendous contributions of that academic philosopher in his chosen area of Thinking about Thought. It couldn’t have been more different than that of the majority of avowed “socialists”. And, after his conversion to Materialism, Marx spent a great deal of time criticising what he called the Utopian Socialists.

For him, the KEY was Philosophy!

And by this he did not mean Academic Philosophy – knowing and describing all the possible varieties, but, on the contrary, and with the same imperatives as the fast growing discipline of Science, his objective was to base all political activities upon establishing the closest understanding of the real nature of Society that he could achieve.

And, he was certain that to be able to do that, you had to follow Hegel’s analysis of Human Thinking – Dialectics, but applied to absolutely all developments, and particularly to that of Society itself.

Now, having myself been in one or another self-professed revolutionary party for over 50 years, I can insist that the people I worked with were NOT like that. From being 19 years old, studying Physics at University, I had come across Lenin’s critique of the philosophy, then in the ascendency in Science – Empirio Criticism, and as a real Marxist, he immediately had known that here was a philosophy that was going badly wrong. On reading his Materialism and Empirio Criticism, I knew it too. And from that moment on I became a very unusual person indeed: for I was both a Physicist and a Marxist.

I soon found that, in my academic studies, these two commitments were said to be on opposite sides. Not a lecturer or a fellow student in my course agreed with me. Physics as a discipline was marching steadily in a very different direction from the Philosophy of Marxism. Yet, it was clear to me that the exact opposite should be the case!

Now, experiencing such a revelation was, I’m afraid, insufficient to either bring about this necessary union, or even develop myself as a Marxist. So, I joined an overt Marxist Party to remedy my evident inadequacies. I hoped that I could be an affective political activist AND a better physicist from what I could learn about Marxism.

But, that wasn’t what I was able to get from a very long history in the Communist Party, the Labour Party the SLL and the WRP, nor did I find anything better in the many other varieties of Trotskyism in UK politics.

In fact, philosophically, they were nowhere, and the reason was that they didn’t DO Marxism as professional, full-time method. Indeed, the only reason I had got so much from Lenin’s book was that I was a physicist, and he was dealing with the then standpoint in Physics, but better than the agreed leaders in the field.

You could never become a Marxist by merely reading the Marxism of the past: you HAD to be doing it NOW! And, in an area you were intimately knowledgible about.

I finally became a Marxist by constantly applying what I knew of that stance in my own specialisms. And, these ranged over Politics, Physics, Biology, Archaeology, Evolution, Sculpture, Mathematics and Computing. Indeed, my stance took me on an unusual journey, and by the time I had posts in various Universities, I was the first port of call for researchers in literally all disciplines, who required tailor-made software to aid them in their studies.

Though I didn’t plan it, my specialism became Computers in Control in a surprisingly wide range of disciplines. I even won a BIVA award with a colleague for our Dance Disc – a Multimedia Aid for the Teaching of Dance Performance and Choreography.

With an increasingly Marxist stance and method I became the leader in this field, and finally got a professorial Post in London University, on the basis of this work.

There could be no doubt about the importance of Marxism as a philosophy, but, the understanding of exactly what that meant in particular areas of application, was something that had to be discovered, involving both successes and failures.

It wasn’t an infallible formula, but a philosophical method that had to be constantly re-applied to an ever-changing context. Book-Marxism was a waste of time, and speculative-Marxism also regularly proved inadequate. Marxists had to be professionals in the best possible sense.

Now, problem number one was that many “Marxists” would agree with all of this, but only apply what they had learned to tackle, which was solely concerned with political problems. But, that could be a dead end! The real power of this philosophy was its universality and its recursivity, for that meant that it could, and indeed, should, be applied to all other disciplines, especially those that were your professional area of expertise.

So, how does it differ from the usual approaches?

First, there are no eternal Natural Laws in Marxism!

The task is always to increase the amount of Objective Content in your theories.

Let us take the example I know particularly well – Physics!

This supposed-to-be Basic Discipline – on which all others are causally based, is incorrect.

It is the simplest basis, but can tell us nothing about the real dynamics and development of all other higher levels of organisation. Most particularly, it can say nothing about Life, about Mankind, or about Human Societies. Indeed, the modern Marxist stance on Physics has been greatly advanced by discoveries at higher levels – not least in the revelation of Emergences (or Revolutions) in the real Qualitative Development of these levels. For now, these same features have been revealed as absolutely imperative in Physics itself – especially in the Major Crisis now unresolved for almost a century!

Indeed, more generally, the usual methods were constantly coming up against both contradictions and dichotomous Concepts, and “solved” them by setting up new categories of study, to ignore these impasses, and carry on with the same methodology, but now in a new, isolated subject. The old methods proliferated the number of these categories, and forever shelved the contradictions that separated one realm from another, as something for “resolving later”.

Now, how did this affect my attempt to become a real Marxist, via my own specialism – Physics? I finally realised that it was up to me. No one else could do it for me.

Initially, literally all my work as a teacher in schools was determined by what I had been taught in my own education. And, there was much there to be communicated and explained to my students. Indeed, it was this imperative of Explanation, that had taken me upon a different route from the now-in-charge physics community. Explanation, which I considered to be Science’s main virtue, was steadily being replaced by Formal Equations as the real, driving causes. So, as a teacher, I from the outset considered it to be my job to “Explain Why” things happened as they did.

The effect on my career was significant. I switched first to solely teaching Mathematics, then Biology, and finally, Computing.

But, in spite of a better approach, I still had to develop philosophically, when I finally scaled the heights via Further Education, finally getting posts in Universities in Hong Kong, Glasgow, Bedford and London. The clincher was when I switched from a Teaching Department to Computer Services, and made my job one of helping researchers in ALL disciplines by writing tailor-made computer programs demanded by the full range of discipline experts. Success in a variety of unusual disciplines caused me to be approached to write a chapter in IBM’s Research and Academic User’s Guide.

Only then, did my philosophical development become consciously Marxist.

The epitome of this work was to be awarded a British Interactive Video Award for the Dance Disc – a multimedia Aid for the Teaching of Dance Performance and Choreography. A following series of projects took us to a leading position in the field, where we have been for 15 years. You would think that more experienced practitioners in the Dance World would catch up and pass us, but it hasn’t happened. There are NO Marxists working in Dance Education!

Now, the above is, of course, a very truncated account.

Indeed, I continued to do research of my own in Mathematics and in Philosophy, and by 2010 I had produced a non-Copenhagen Theory of the Double Slit Experiments and a New Theory of Emergences. My colleague in Dance and I produced another dozen titles, and she was awarded a Ph. D. for her brilliant adaptions of her extensive teaching knowledge to our products.

When my sight began to fail, I retired from that work, and became a full-time Marxist writer on Science and Philosophy

And, in politics, it wasn’t just activism, or knowing what Marx said in innumerable situations. It was definitely his philosophy and dialectical method that was crucial. And, I had to apply it (once I grasped it) to the biggest ever Crisis in Physics – the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, and begin to solve its many anomalies to confirm that I was finally a Real Marxist.




Postscript:

Of course, this very short paper has said very little about The Marxist Method, because stating in it generally is neither easy nor informative. The core of the Method is constructed upon Hegel’s discoveries into how we actually think, and, most importantly, how we are regularly brought to a halt by impasses, occurring as consequences of our assumptions and principles. What he then delivered was not just a view of this trajectory, but also a means of transcending its impasses.

And, of course, the detailed nature of these will look very different in widely separated disciplines. Finally, this method cannot be a final and fixed set of procedures, but will be at any juncture limited by the width of our applications and consequent understanding. So, to continually develop it, it has to be re-discovered in discipline after discipline, and literally all the time, not only solving the particular problems involved, but also in developing the philosophical method too.

New Special Issue: Work in Progress

Marxist Philosophy 2014

This Special is somewhat different to our usual offerings of this form in SHAPE Journal. It has a very different purpose! Indeed, the reader may well be immediately aware of its unfinished nature, and take issue with some of its note-like offerings. Good!

For this form is intended to encourage criticism and opposing contributions by other present day Marxists out there. SHAPE gets over 100 hits a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year, and an analysis of the topics accessed (on the SHAPE Blog for example) indicates that it is the philosophical works that are by far the most popular. There are readers of our sites in 120 countries (Sorry, 121 – someone in Guatemala added to the total today), and these include not only the usual “surfing” nations, such as the USA, but also an increasing number from Russia, Ukraine, Romania and many other ex-Soviet nations, as well as literally the whole of South and Central America, and recently France, Germany, Poland and Slovenia have arrived in significant numbers too.

But, when the usual outlets for other Marxists’ work are monitored, they are, to say the least, disappointing. What is needed is a new generation of serious and committed Marxist philosophers – constantly extending and deepening the Marxist View. And, they should be addressing the very areas where the non-Marxists are signally failing to make any real contributions.

This Special, therefore, hopes to get a response from them! Comments and even contributions are welcomed. And, as we don’t usually work within the usual Social Networking methods on the Internet, it is suggested that these should be sent direct to us by email: shape@bild-art.co.uk

If writers permit it, their contributions will be published in a Special Issue, (so say which country you are from), and if we get sufficient this could become a regular feature. None of contributor’s details will be given to anyone else! Use nom de plumes if you want to. This philosopher has written almost 650 papers over the last five years and could do with some help tackling these difficult questions!

Read issue

New Special Issue: The Holist Revolution

 

This collection of papers might be the most siginifcant contribution in the work towards a holist approach to all the sciences. It advances what Hegel set as his primary goal, which was to develop a ‘Logic of Change’ to take over where Formal Logic had always failed - during interludes of significant qualitative change.

Even 200 years ago Hegel had identified crises in many disciplines where the prior assumptions and principles on which they were based, had run out of steam, and were beginning to come apart at the seams. He, in particular, recognised the appearance of what he termed Dichotomous Pairs - which were principles that though effective in certain areas, were in fact, mutually contradictory, and could therefore never be unified into a single principle covering both. Indeed, though crises may be considered to be typically of short duration, Hegel realised that such situations could persist for very long periods. Man learned to switch between the Dichotomous Pairs to use whichever principle worked in a given situation.

Hegel argued that by such methods, real understanding had been brought to a halt, and that any solution gained by such switching was merely pragmatic and needed to be transcended. He insisted they should be addressed with a view to revealing, criticising and ultimately replacing the assumptions on which they were based, resolving the impasse to a new level. This was Dialectical Reasoning, and the transcending to a new level was termed an Emergence.

The papers in this issue attempt to outline these methods in eight different disciplines, occasionally being profound enough to demolish the older methods of analysis and attempted understanding, for a more comprehensive approach that covers not only periods of stability, but crucially, the transforming interludes that we term Emergences.


Read issue