Abstract

For years, analytical philosophers raised in the tradition of Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, along with idealist or “western” Marxists, have ridiculed Engels' “dialectics of nature” and the concomitant idea that change involves contradiction. In rejecting the dialectics of nature, Sartre and the early Lukacs surrendered nature to the positivists and neo-Kantians; Lichtheim and other pundits of English Marxology have attempted to totally separate the “Hegelian-positivist” Engels and his philosophy of nature from Marx's philosophy of man. Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station pokes fun at Engels' dialectic in an even cruder fashion, and wrongly attributes Plekhanov's terminology to him. They all overlook Marx's claim in the Parisian Manuscripts that the science of man and the science of nature will become one science.