dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science, history, and nature developed in Europe and based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxist dialectics, as a materialist philosophy, emphasizes the importance of real-world con ...
– to nature.
History and contents
Engels wrote most of the manuscript between 1872 and 1882, which was a melange of
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
notations on the contemporary development of science and technology; however, it was not published within his lifetime. In later times,
Eduard Bernstein
Eduard Bernstein (; 6 January 1850 – 18 December 1932) was a German social democratic Marxist theorist and politician. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Bernstein had held close association to Karl Marx and Friedric ...
passed the manuscripts to
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
, who thought the science confused (particularly the
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
and
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
) but the overall work worthy of a broader readership. After that in 1925, the
Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute
The Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, established in Moscow in 1919 as the Marx–Engels Institute (russian: Институт К. Маркса и Ф. Энгельса), was a Soviet library and archive attached to the Communist Academy. The instit ...
in
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
published the manuscripts (a bilingual German/Russian edition).
The biologist
J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (; 5 November 18921 December 1964), nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS", was a British-Indian scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. With innovative use of statistics in biolog ...
wrote a preface for the work in 1939, "Hence it is often hard to follow if one does not know the history of the scientific practice of that time. The idea of what is now called the
conservation of energy
In physics and chemistry, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant; it is said to be ''conserved'' over time. This law, first proposed and tested by Émilie du Châtelet, means th ...
was beginning to permeate physics, chemistry and biology, but it was still very incompletely realised, and still more incompletely applied. Words such as 'force', 'motion', and 'vis viva' were used where we should now speak of energy".
Some then controversial topics of Engels' day, pertaining to incomplete or faulty theories, are now settled, making some of Engels' essays dated. "Their interest lies not so much in their detailed criticism of theories, but in showing how Engels grappled with intellectual problems".
One "law" proposed in the ''Dialectics of Nature'' is the "law of the transformation of quantity into quality and ''vice versa''". Probably the most commonly cited example of this is the change of water from a liquid to a gas, by increasing its temperature (although Engels also describes other examples from chemistry). In contemporary science, this process is known as a
phase transition
In chemistry, thermodynamics, and other related fields, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states of ...
. There has also been an effort to apply this mechanism to social phenomena, whereby increases in population result in changes in social structure.Carneiro, R.L. (2000). The transition from quantity to quality: A neglected causal mechanism in accounting for social evolution ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', Vol. 97, No. 23, pp. 12926–12931. See for a discussion of the historical development of dialectics. See Lincoln, Charle The Dialectical Path of Law 2021 Rowman & Littlefield.
Dialectics and its study was derived from the philosopher and author of ''
Science of Logic
''Science of Logic'' (''SL''; german: Wissenschaft der Logik, ''WdL''), first published between 1812 and 1816, is the work in which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel outlined his vision of logic. Hegel's logic is a system of '' dialectics'', i.e., ...
'',
G. W. F. Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends a ...
, who, in turn, had studied the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus (; grc-gre, Ἡράκλειτος , "Glory of Hera"; ) was an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from the city of Ephesus, which was then part of the Persian Empire.
Little is known of Heraclitus's life. He wrote ...
. Heraclitus taught that everything was constantly changing and that all things consisted of two opposite elements which changed into each other as night changes into day, light into darkness, life into death etc.
Engels's work develops from the comments he had made about science in ''
Anti-Dühring
''Anti-Dühring'' (german: Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, "Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science") is a book by Friedrich Engels, first published in German in 1878. It had previously been serialised in the newspaper ''V ...
''. It includes the famous "
The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
"The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" (German: "Anteil der Arbeit an der Menschwerdung des Affen") is an unfinished essay written by Friedrich Engels in the spring of 1876. The essay forms the ninth chapter of ''Dialectics o ...
", which has also been published separately as a pamphlet. Engels argues that the hand and brain grew together, an idea supported by later fossil discoveries (see Australopithecus afarensis#Bipedalism).
Most of the work is fragmentary and in the form of rough notes, as shown in this quotation from the section entitled "Biology":
See also
*
Natural philosophy
Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin ''philosophia naturalis'') is the philosophical study of physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior throu ...
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
of edition published by
Progress Publishers
Progress Publishers was a Moscow-based Soviet publisher founded in 1931.
Publishing program
Progress Publishers published books in a variety of languages: Russian, English, and many other European and Asian languages. They issued many scientific b ...