ON HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF LESZEK NOWAK’S IDEALIZATIONAL CONCEPTION OF SCIENCE

• Authors: Wierzchosławski Rafał Pawe
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The famous saying Habent sua fata libeli, can also apply to (philosophical) ideas, especially the most abstract ones. As it seems, the invocation of this maxim may have also some application in interpreting the concept of idealization of the concept of science, for the understanding of which it is useful to pay attention to the historical, social and political context. I argue that the analytical Marxism of the Poznan School of the 1970s and 1980s was a philosophical reflection of certain modernization processes of the real socialist system (the managerial revolution and the technocratic modernization of the Gierek era), which was an attempt to “escape forward” from the dysfunctional “manual control” of the system during the period of minor stabilization of the 1960s. At the same time, this period ended the ideological functions of Marxist philosophy (March 1968) by introducing an expert dimension that emphasized the use of contemporary currents of thought present in the thought of Western countries. The idealizing interpretation of Marx as an insightful methodologist, whose legacy makes it possible to overcome methodological dilemmas in modern philosophy of science, was also aimed at finding such an aspect that made it possible to defend against factual charges directed against the Marxist system in the social sciences. A refined conceptual scheme was supposed to give the nimbus of being scientific. However, the sophistication of the late scholasticism of analytical Marxism did not save this construction in its empirical verification (the problem of predicting social phenomena) and led the author to create a non-Marxist Historical Materialism as a separate theory, which was to focus on the structural-functional analysis of the historical process, which involved putting aside the study of idealization “to the side.”

Keywords

EN

IDEALIZATION; LESZEK NOWAK; MODERNIZATION; HISTORICAL MATERIALISM; POZNAŃ SCHOOL OF METHODOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 30
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 137 – 147

Contributors

author

Wierzchosławski Rafał Pawe

• Liberal Arts and Sciences, Collegium Historicum, Adam Mickiewicz University, ul. Uniwersytetu Poznańskiego 7, 61-614 Poznań, Poland

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0460-1669

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2023.30203