by NEVILLE SPENCER
The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective by Alan Woods (Wellred Books, London, 2021)
Alan Woods’ The History of Philosophy takes a specifically Marxist perspective to marshal the vicissitudes of Western philosophy — from Ancient Greece through to the development of Marxist philosophy itself — into a coherent framework.
The book covers ancient Greek philosophy; the influence of Christianity from the time of the late Roman Empire; the philosophy of the Middle Ages in Europe and the Islamic world; the Renaissance; and philosophers through to the 19th century — such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Hegel — up to the development of the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The history is primarily limited to philosophy as it evolved in Europe. A chapter on Indian philosophy was left out to keep to a more manageable scope.
The geographic detour represented by covering the philosophy of the Islamic world is necessary in virtue of the fact that it was here that the philosophy of ancient Greece was preserved and developed when Europe entered the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire. And it was from here that it re-entered Europe in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
The philosophy of Marx and Engels is generally and usefully labelled “dialectical materialism”.
The materialism aspect of it sets it on one side of the conflict stretching back to ancient Greece between two counterposed perspectives, the other being idealism, which has recurred in different forms throughout the history of philosophy.
While materialism views thought as a product of the material world with the ability to represent that material world, for idealism thought is an independent or even the only realm of reality and the material world we think about is seen as being in some or all respects a product of thought itself.
The earliest Greek philosophers, from the Ionian Islands in the sixth and seventh centuries BC, were materialists and sought to find the underlying principles of nature.
Thales thought that all matter was based on different forms of water while Anaximenes thought it was air. Though the possibilities of modern science was not available to them, they still sought to explain the world around them in terms of forms of matter, and matter that could move and transform itself without any need for the hand of gods or supernatural forces.
This probably explains why they were also surprisingly far-sighted in terms of science. Anaximander, for instance, prefigured Darwin by two millennia suggesting that humans had evolved from marine animals.
Greek philosophy subsequently developed idealist schools such as the Pythagoreans and that established by Plato.
Plato represents an iconic position in idealist philosophy. For him, the “universals” with which we think about and describe the world constitute a separate realm of ideas or forms from the material world.
As Woods explains it: “The universals of thought, for example, the idea of a circle, had an independent existence, separate and apart from particular round objects … the plate, like all other crude material objects, is merely an imperfect manifestation of the idea”.
Plato’s pupil Aristotle, however, represents a turn back towards materialism.
Dialectics — that other element of dialectical materialism — also has origins going back to ancient Greece.
Heraclitus (c. 544-484 BC) wrote: “We step and we do not step into the same stream; we are and are not.”
A stream, like the world in general, is in constant motion and is never the same from one instant to the next.
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