The book presents an integral Marxist conception of the dialectics and methodology of scientific theoretical cognition, of the dialectical interrelation between the abstract and the concrete, of the unity of the historical and the logical, of the correlat

In Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism Levant and Oittinen provide a window into the subterranean tradition of ‘creative’ Soviet Marxism, which developed on the margins of the Soviet academe and remains largely outside the orbit of contemporary theory in the West. With his ‘activity approach’, E.V. Ilyenkov, its principal figure in the post-Stalin period, makes a substantial contribution toward an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of the subject, which should be of interest to contemporary theorists who seek to avoid economic and cultural reductionism as well as the malaise of postmodern relativism. This volume features Levant’s translation of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal (2009), which remained unpublished until thirty years after the author’s tragic suicide in 1979. Contributors include: Evald Ilyenkov, Tarja Knuuttila, Alex Levant, Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen, Paula Rauhala, and Birger Siebert.

This book traces the development of Dialectical Logic within the history of modern western philosophy, culminating in Marx s materialist dialectics. It brings out the essential contours of Logic through a detailed exposition of the ontological and epistem

This book argues that the dialectic of Marx's Capital has a systematic, rather than historical, character. It sheds new light on Marx's great work, while going beyond it in many respects.

Kosik writes that the history of a text is in a certain sense the history of its interpretations. In the fifteen years that have passed since the fust (Czech) edition of his Dialectics of the Concrete, this book has been widely read and interpreted throughout Europe, in diverse centers of scholarship as well as in private studies. A faithful English language edition is long overdue. This publication of KosIk's work will surely provoke a range of new interpretations. For its theme is the characterization of science and of rationality in the context of the social roots of science and the social critique which an appropriately rational science should afford. Kosik's question is: How shall Karl Marx's understanding of science itself be understood? And how can it be further developed? In his treatment of the question of scientific rationality, Kosik drives bluntly into the issues of gravest human concern, not the least of which is how to avoid the pseudo-concrete, the pseudo-scientific, the pseudo-rational, the pseudo historical. Starting with Marx's methodological approach, of "ascending from the abstract to the concrete", Kosik develops a critique of positivism, of phenomenalist empiricism, and of "metaphysical" rationalism, counter posing them to "dialectical rationalism". He takes the category of the concrete in the dialectical sense of that which comes to be known by the active transformation of nature and society by human purposive activity.

This book demonstrates that the basic concepts of the three volumes of Capital come under different categories of time: "time of production" in the first volume is linear, “time of circulation” in the second is circular, while in the third volume “organic time” is the unity of the two. Capitalist relations emerge as a definite organisation of social time that obeys its own intrinsic criteria and operates as an autonomous, social subject. Reading Capital from this perspective, it becomes possible to restore its dialectical (Hegelian) logic – not in order to reveal the “real” Marx, but as a means to contribute to the understanding of the real, capitalist world with its present-day fetishes, its explosive contradictions and its ever deeper crises.