Concept
Materialism and Empirio-criticism
Overview
Materialism and Empirio-criticism (Russian: Материализм и эмпириокритицизм, Materializm i empiriokrititsizm) is a philosophical work by Vladimir Lenin, published in 1909. It was an obligatory subject of study in all institutions of higher education in the Soviet Union, as a seminal work of dialectical materialism, a part of the curriculum called "Marxist–Leninist Philosophy". Lenin said that human minds are capable of forming representations of the world that portray the world as it is. Thus, Lenin said, our beliefs about the world can be objectively true; a belief is true when it accurately reflects the facts. According to Lenin, absolute truth is possible, but our theories are often only relatively true. Scientific theories can therefore constitute knowledge of the world.
Lenin formulates the fundamental philosophical contradiction between idealism and materialism as follows: "Materialism is the recognition of 'objects in themselves' or objects outside the mind; the ideas and sensations are copies or images of these objects. The opposite doctrine (idealism) says: the objects do not exist, outside the mind '; they are 'connections of sensations'."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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This is only another form of the old ideological, _a priori_ method so called, which learned the properties of an object not from the object itself but derived them by proof from the concept of the object. First you derive a concept of the object from the actual object, then you turn the spit and measure the object in terms of its derivative the concept. The concept is not shaped after the pattern of the object but…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
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Is our thought in a position to recognize the real world? Can we, in our ideas and notion of the real world, produce a correct reflection of the reality? This question is called in philosophical language the question of the identity of thinking and being, and is affirmed by the great majority of philosophers. According to Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident, for that which we know in the actual world…
Friedrich Engels, Feuerbach
States what Materialism and Empirio-criticism is; the author is tied to Materialism and Empirio-criticism in the knowledge graph.
This is why materialism will always fail of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity. For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the impulses which we most cherish. The real _meaning_ of the impulses, it says, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever.
William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
States what Materialism and Empirio-criticism is.
Philosophers who discussed Materialism and Empirio-criticism
Related ideas
- Richard Avenarius
- Vladimir Lenin
- Geneva
- London
- Moscow
- Marxism–Leninism
- Paris
- Immanence
- Russian language
- Russian Revolution
- Soviet Union
- Alexander Bogdanov
- Nikolay Chernyshevsky
- Ludwig Feuerbach
- Dialectical materialism
- Friedrich Engels
- Bolsheviks
- Ernst Mach
- Solipsism
- Ernst Haeckel
- Vladimir Bazarov
- Joseph Dietzgen
- Pavel Yushkevich
Place in the tradition
Part of German philosophy.
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