CHARVAKA

Marxism

  • Ramkrishna Bhattacharya on György Lukács

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    manojthazath@gmail.com

    Ramkrishna Bhattacharya György Lukács (13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician,literary historian, and critic. He was, according to Wikiipedia, one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxistideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx’s theory of class consciousness. He was…

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  • Georg Lukács, Philosopher and Aesthetician

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    manojthazath@gmail.com

    Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Not a doctrine but a method Georg Lukács (1885-1971), philosopher and aesthetician, was one of the original philosophers of the twentieth century. A lifelong Marxist, he always believed that Marxism was not a doctrine but a method. In his seminal essay, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ he insisted on this point as Engels had…

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  • Critiquing Timpanaro’s Concept of Hedonism vis-à-vis Materialism – PART I

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    manojthazath@gmail.com

      Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Sebastiano Timpanaro believed that ‘the agreement between materialism and Leopardian pessimism had its basis in hedonism; and hedonism is the basis of all scientific systems of ethics’ (On Materialism p.66). I have already critiqued Timpanaro’s concept of ‘materialist pessimism’ (Psyche and Society 11: 2 December 2013, 7-15). Let us now turn to…

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  • Critiquing Timpanaro’s Concept of ‘materialist pessimism’

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    manojthazath@gmail.com

    Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Sebastiano Timpanaro One of the novel and surprising concepts proposed by Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000), the well-known Marxist philologist-cum-philosopher, is that of ‘materialist pessimism’ (p.66). His plea is to recognize this concept as a part of the Marxist worldview. Time and again he comes back to it in his book, Sul Materialismo (1970, translated…

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  • Engels, Dialectics and Buddhism

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    manojthazath@gmail.com

    Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The book that has come down to us under the title Dialectics of Naure is strictly speaking not a book but an edited version of four folders containing miscellaneous notes and jottings left unfinished by their author, Frederick Engles. The material was never published in Engles’s life time although parts of it were…

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  • Marx and the Materialist Tradition in Indian Philosophy

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    manojthazath@gmail.com

    Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The title of the paper may sound odd to some, for Marx, in spite of his encyclopedic learning, was not at all conversant with the Indian philosophical tradition. Yet there are a few points in Marx’s works that may be of use in relation to the reconstruction of the materialist tradition in Indian…

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