Eminent Harvard astrophysicist David Layzer offers readers a unified theory of natural order and its origins, from the permanence, stability, and orderliness of sub-atomic particles to the evolution of the human mind. Cosmogenesis provides the first extended account of a controversial theorythat connects quantum mechanics with the second law of thermodynamics, and presents novel resolutions of longstanding paradoxes in these theories, such as those of Schroedinger's cat and the arrow of time. Layzer's main concerns in the second half of the (...) book are with the philosophical issuessurrounding science. He develops a highly original reconciliation of the conflict between traditional scientific determinism and the intuitive notion of individual freedom. He argues that although the elementary processes underlying biological evolution and human development are governed byphysical laws, they are nevertheless genuinely creative and unpredictable. (shrink)

Schrödinger's Cat & The Golden Bough addresses the relationship between science and mythology from the starting points of Frazer's The Golden Bough and Erwin Schrödinger's famous cat. From the Greek origins of modern scientific thought, Bancroft traces the intertwining and separation of mythology, magic, and science through the ages. Drawing on psychology, mythology, literature, and history of science, the author, a physicist who works with electromagnetic Field Theory, presents a fascinating and provocative cross-disciplinary study.

Commentary on Bādarāyaṇa's Brahmasūtra, basic text of the Vedanta philosophy, in the light of the philosophical tenets preached in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

This essay offers a discussion and contextualisation of a series of letters exchanged between Jordi Cat and Paul Feyerabend from 1989 to 1994. These letters provide insights into Feyerabend’s later thought on a variety of themes including quantum holism, the disunity of science, the development of logical empiricism, and science activism. In doing so, we provide some original analysis and exegesis of Feyerabend’s evolving views on scientific methodology and quantum mechanics by focusing on Feyerabend’s changing attitudes towards Bohm, Bohr, and (...) his eventual colleague Hans Primas and his later sympathies with the algebraic approach. We also highlight Feyerabend’s role in the growth of the Disunity of Science movement and how he connected disunity to practical considerations in the philosophy of action. (shrink)

Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. The book is divided into three sections: Neurath's biographical background and the economic and social context of his ideas; his theory of science; and the development of his role in debates on Marxist concepts of history and his own conception of science. Coinciding with the emerging serious interest in logical positivism, this timely publication will redress a current imbalance in the history and philosophy of (...) science. (shrink)

There is no paradox with Schrödinger’s cat in a realist interpretation. In particular, a closer look at the temporal aspect shows that the two macroscopic wave functions (alive and dead) of Schrödinger’s cat are not to be compared with two superposed parts of a microscopic quantum wave function.

I present results of recent work in the field of quantum optics and relate this work to discussions about the theory of quantum mechanics and God's divine action in the world. Experiments involving atomic decay, relevant to event uncertainty in quantum mechanics, as well as experiments aimed at elucidating the so–called Schrödinger’s–cat paradox, help clarify apparent ambiguities or paradoxes that I believe are at the heart of renewed attempts to locate God within our constructed physical theories and tend to (...) narrow the gaps proposed as an opening for divine action. Some problems arise because of imprecise use of nonmathematical language to force quantum mechanics into an intuitive “classical” framework. (shrink)

Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg were the originators of two approaches, known respectively as “wave mechanics” and “matrix mechanics”, to what is now called “quantum mechanics” or “quantum theory”. The two approaches appear to be extremely different, both in their technical forms, and in their philosophical underpinnings. Heisenberg arrived at his theory by effectively renouncing the idea of trying to represent a physical system, such as a hydrogen Bohr's atom model for example, as a structure in space—time, but instead, following (...) the lead of Einstein's 1905 theory of relativity, representing only empirically observable properties, such as the transition amplitudes between the stationary states of the atom. These amplitudes can be arranged in square arrays of numbers. In Heisenberg's scheme these arrays, and other like them, are combined according to certain rules that were later recognized by Max Born to be the rules of matrix multiplication. The whole scheme is abstract and mathematical, and avoids using any space—time picture of what is going on at the atomic level. Schrödinger, on the other hand, represented the electron in an atom by a cloudlike wave surrounding the nucleus. This is a space—time structure that, superficially at least, is more in line with the classical physical theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. -/- Niels Bohr invited Schrödinger to come to Copenhagen to present his ideas, and to discuss this subject with himself, Heisenberg, and others. Schrödinger arrived in Copenhagen on October 1st, 1926, and was immediately intensively engaged by Bohr and the others in a “debate” that lasted for days. Eventually, Schrödinger become ill, and was confined in Bohr's home to a bed, upon which Bohr sat, continuing the discussion. Schrödinger finally exclaimed “If all the quantum jumping is here to stay, then I am sorry that I ever became involved in quantum mechanics”. Bohr replied, “But we are glad that you did!”. (shrink)

What is it to be seen (naked) by one's cat? In “L'animal que donc je suis” (2006), the first of several lectures that he presented at a conference on the “autobiographical animal,” Jacques Derrida tells of his discomfort when, emerging from his shower one day, he found himself being looked at by his cat. Th experience leads him, by way of reflections on the question of the animal, to what is arguably the question of his philosophy: Who am I? It (...) is not so much that Derrida wants to answer this question as to be free of it. His task here is to determine the sense of it— where it leads, for example, when it comes to the nature of the diff erence between himself and his cat. Unlike animal rights activists (and unlike philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who have recently addressed this issue), Derrida does not want to erase this difference but wants to multiply it in order (among other things) to affirm the absolute alterity or singularity of his cat, which cannot be subsumed by any category (such as the animal). His cat is an Other in a way that no human being (supposing there to be such a thing, which Derrida is not prepared to grant) could ever be. And here is where “the question who?” leads as well, namely, to a path of escape from absorption into any identity-machine. As Derrida puts it in A Taste for the Secret: Who am I when I am not one of you? In a hospitable world one would be free not to answer. (shrink)

Contributed articles on the life and works of Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Indian philosopher and Indologist; includes some of his writings and letters.

This work-in-progress paper consists of four points which relate to the foundations and physical realization of quantum computing. The first point is that the qubit cannot be taken as the basic unit for quantum computing, because not every superposition of bit-strings of length n can be factored into a string of n-qubits. The second point is that the “No-cloning” theorem does not apply to the copying of one quantum register into another register, because the mathematical representation of this copying is (...) the identity operator, which is manifestly linear. The third point is that quantum parallelism is not destroyed only by environmental decoherence. There are two other forms of decoherence, which we call measurement decoherence and internal decoherence, that can also destroy quantum parallelism. The fourth point is that processing the contents of a quantum register “one qubit at a time” destroys entanglement. (shrink)

In _Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics_, Cat Moir offers a new interpretation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Moir challenges perceptions of Bloch as a naïve utopian thinker via a close contextualised reading of his speculative materialism.

In Exodus 2, Moses has two mothers; his Hebrew mother, who nurses him and the daughter of Pharaoh, who financially supports his Hebrew mother, adopts him, and names him. Pharaoh’s daughter appears in scholarly discussions, yet little attention is given to her role as mother of Moses. Indeed, this motherhood is downplayed in the biblical texts, and also in biblical scholarship, wherein the daughter of Pharaoh is absent from many discussions of biblical mothers and is at times relegated beneath the (...) birthmother in commentaries. This article argues that we should remember and celebrate the daughter of Pharaoh as a mother of Moses. (shrink)

The Schrodinger's Cat and Wigner's Friend thought experiments, which logically follow from the universality of quantum mechanics at all scales, have been repeatedly characterized as possible in principle, if perhaps difficult or impossible for all practical purposes. I show in this paper why these experiments, and interesting macroscopic superpositions in general, are actually impossible in principle. First, no macroscopic superposition can be created via the slow process of natural quantum packet dispersion because all macroscopic objects are inundated with decohering interactions (...) that constantly localize them. Second, the SC/WF thought experiments depend on von Neumann-style amplification to achieve quickly what quantum dispersion achieves slowly. Finally, I show why such amplification cannot produce a macroscopic quantum superposition of an object relative to an external observer, no matter how well isolated the object from the observer, because: the object and observer are already well correlated to each other; and reducing their correlations to allow the object to achieve a macroscopic superposition relative to the observer is equally impossible, in principle, as creating a macroscopic superposition via the process of natural quantum dispersion. (shrink)

Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science reopens the question of the relevance of quantum mechanics to the social sciences. In response, I argue that due to “quantum decoherence,” the macroscopic world filters out quantum effects. Moreover, quantum decoherence makes it unlikely that the theory of quantum brains, on which Wendt relies, is true. Finally, while quantum decision theory is a potentially revolutionary field, it has not clearly accounted for alleged anomalies in classical understandings of decision making. However, the logic (...) of quantum decoherence can motivate a new approach to the structure-agent problem. (shrink)

Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. The book is divided into three sections: Neurath's biographical background and the economic and social context of his ideas; his theory of science; and the development of his role in debates on Marxist concepts of history and his own conception of science. Coinciding with the emerging serious interest in logical positivism, this timely publication will redress a current imbalance in the history and philosophy of (...) science. (shrink)

Previous discussions of Robb’s work on space and time have offered a philosophical focus on causal interpretations of relativity theory or a historical focus on his use of non-Euclidean geometry, or else ignored altogether in discussions of relativity at Cambridge. In this paper I focus on how Robb’s work made contact with those same foundational developments in mathematics and with their applications. This contact with applications of new mathematical logic at Göttingen and Cambridge explains the transition from his electron research (...) to his treatment of relativity in 1911 and finally to the axiomatic presentation in 1914 in terms of postulates. At the heart of Robb’s physical optics was the model of the light cone. The model underwent a transition from a working mechanical model in the Maxwellian Cambridge sense of a pedagogical and research tool to the semantic model, in the logical, model-theoretic sense. Robb tracked this transition from the 19th- to the 20th-century conception with the earliest use of the term ‘model’ in the new sense. I place his cone models in a genealogy of similar models and use their evolution to track how Robb’s physical researches were informed by his interest in geometry, logic and the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

High levels of violence and conflict occur in inpatient psychiatric settings, causing a range of psychological and physical harms to both patients and staff. Drawing on critiques of vulnerability from the philosophical literature, this paper contends that staff's understanding of their relationship with patients (including how they should respond to violence and conflict) rests on the dominant, reductive account of vulnerability. This account frames vulnerability as an increased susceptibility to harm and so regards ‘invulnerable’ staff's responsibility to be protecting and (...) managing vulnerable patients. We offer an alternative view of vulnerability as an openness and capability to be changed, which illuminates how the common account of vulnerability is used to justify staff's coercive power over patients and to control staff behaviour. Our main argument is that staff's adoption of this negative approach to vulnerability is associated with a range of factors that are connected to the violence and conflict endemic to these settings. Staff's need to situate themselves as invulnerable and therefore incapable of harm, we argue, leads to significant issues through: damaging staff ability to emotionally regulate; coercing patients into an asymmetrical openness leading to aggression to restore status; damaging therapeutic relationships by enforcing separation between staff and patients; increasing staff's reliance on unhelpful and rigid techniques (such as de‐escalation); repressing staffs’ ability to learn and grow through encounters with patients. Finally, we offer recommendations for how vulnerability and openness could be cultivated as a relational and radical practice in spaces that are traditionally closed and hostile to it. (shrink)

This article argues that G. E. Lessing should be viewed as one of the German Enlightenment’s foremost thinkers of peace alongside his contemporary Immanuel Kant, whose contribution to thinking peace in the eighteenth century is already well recognised. It makes this case by examining two of Lessing’s late works: the 1779 drama Nathan the Wise and the 1780 essay The Education of the Human Race. The dialogue between faith and reason characteristic of Enlightenment discourse is at the heart of both (...) texts, but here it is argued that peace is a crucial third moment. While in Nathan Lessing asserts the need to find peace between the forces of faith and reason in a literary register, in the Education essay he does so in a more explicitly theoretical mode. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 40-42.

In this paper I examine the notion and role of metaphors and illustrations in Maxwell's works in exact science as a pathway into a broader and richer philosophical conception of a scientist and scientific practice. While some of these notions and methods are still at work in current scientific research-from economics and biology to quantum computation and quantum field theory-, here I have chosen to attest to their entrenchment and complexity in actual science by attempting to make some conceptual sense (...) of Maxwell's own usage; this endeavour includes situating Maxwell's conceptions and applications in his own culture of Victorian science and philosophy. I trace Maxwell's notions to the formulation of the problem of understanding, or interpreting, abstract representations such as potential functions and Lagrangian equations. I articulate the solution in terms of abstract-concrete relations, where the concrete, in tune with Victorian British psychology and engineering, includes the muscular as well as the pictorial. This sets the basis for a conception of understanding in terms of unification and concrete modelling, or representation. I examine the relation of illustration to analogies and metaphors on which this account rests. Lastly, I stress and explain the importance of context-dependence, its consequences for realism-instrumentalism debates, and Maxwell's own emphasis on method. (shrink)

If a Zen Master kills a kitten, and does not hear its scream, does it make a sound? In this essay, I use the Zen story of Master Nansen's killing of a kitten as an entree into a reflection on the Zen experience of enlightenment. I argue that the story of Nansen and the cat, as presented in the Zen tradition, raises many questions and problems that must be resolved if we are to envision the enlightenment experience in a clear (...) way. (shrink)

: The distinction between science and philosophy plays a central role in methodological, programmatic and institutional debates. Discussions of disciplinary identities typically focus on boundaries or else on genealogies, yielding models of demarcation and models of dynamics. Considerations of a discipline's self-image, often based on history, often plays an important role in the values, projects and practices of its members. Recent focus on the dynamics of scientific change supplements Kuhnian neat model with a role for philosophy and yields a model (...) of the evolution of philosophy of science. This view illuminates important aspects of science and itself contributes to philosophy of science. This interactive model is general yet based on exclusive attention to physics. In this paper and two sequels, I focus on the human sciences and argue that their role in the history of philosophy of science is just as important and it also involves a close involvement of the history of philosophy. The focus is on Gestalt psychology and it points to some lessons for philosophy of science. But, unlike the discussion of natural sciences, the discussion here brings out more complication than explication, and skews certain kinds of generalizations. (shrink)

In 'How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat?' David Lewis argues that the Everettian no-collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics is in a tangle when it comes to probabilities. This paper aims to show that the difficulties that Lewis raises are insubstantial. The Everettian metaphysics contains a coherent account of probability. Indeed it accounts for probability rather better than orthodox metaphysics does.

Ernst Bloch’s recourse to speculative philosophy has guaranteed him the position of a perpetual outsider in the history of Western Marxism. When Jürgen Habermas described Bloch’s philosophy in 1960 as a ‘speculative materialism’, it was to denounce him for crossing the boundaries of critical thought set down as much by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as by Marx’s critique of political economy. This article argues that Bloch’s speculative materialism deserves to be re-assessed. Contrary to Habermas’s assertion that speculation is divorced (...) from critique, I argue with Bloch that the speculative hypotheses we unavoidably use to interpret the world around us inform our political beliefs and actions, and to stifle speculative thinking as that creative and inquisitive enterprise which questions and transgresses the given is not only a ‘crime against reason’, as Hilary Putnam once claimed, but also a crime against freedom. (shrink)

We propose a technical reformulation of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics, which is based on the postulate that the final state of a measurement is classical; this accords with experimental practice as well as with Bohr’s views. Unlike the usual formulation (in which the post-measurement state is a unit vector in Hilbert space), our version actually opens the possibility of admitting a purely technical solution within the confines of conventional quantum theory (as opposed to solutions that either modify this (...) theory, or introduce unusual and controversial interpretative rules and/or ontologies). To that effect, we recall a remarkable phenomenon in the theory of Schrödinger operators (discovered in 1981 by Jona-Lasinio, Martinelli, and Scoppola), according to which the ground state of a symmetric double-well Hamiltonian (which is paradigmatically of Schrödinger’s Cat type) becomes exponentially sensitive to tiny perturbations of the potential as ħ→0. We show that this instability emerges also from the textbook wkb approximation, extend it to time-dependent perturbations, and study the dynamical transition from the ground state of the double well to the perturbed ground state (in which the cat is typically either dead or alive, depending on the details of the perturbation). Numerical simulations show that adiabatically arising perturbations may (quite literally) cause the collapse of the wave-function in the classical limit. Thus, at least in the context of a simple mathematical model, we combine the technical and conceptual virtues of decoherence (which fails to solve the measurement problem but launches the key idea that perturbations may come from the environment) with those of dynamical collapse models à la grw (which do solve the measurement problem but are ad hoc), without sharing their drawbacks: single measurement outcomes are obtained (instead of merely diagonal reduced density matrices), and no modification of quantum mechanics is needed. (shrink)

We propose a technical reformulation of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics, which is based on the postulate that the final state of a measurement is classical; this accords with experimental practice as well as with Bohr’s views. Unlike the usual formulation (in which the post-measurement state is a unit vector in Hilbert space), our version actually opens the possibility of admitting a purely technical solution within the confines of conventional quantum theory (as opposed to solutions that either modify this (...) theory, or introduce unusual and controversial interpretative rules and/or ontologies).To that effect, we recall a remarkable phenomenon in the theory of Schrödinger operators (discovered in 1981 by Jona-Lasinio, Martinelli, and Scoppola), according to which the ground state of a symmetric double-well Hamiltonian (which is paradigmatically of Schrödinger’s Cat type) becomes exponentially sensitive to tiny perturbations of the potential as ħ→0. We show that this instability emerges also from the textbook wkb approximation, extend it to time-dependent perturbations, and study the dynamical transition from the ground state of the double well to the perturbed ground state (in which the cat is typically either dead or alive, depending on the details of the perturbation).Numerical simulations show that adiabatically arising perturbations may (quite literally) cause the collapse of the wave-function in the classical limit. Thus, at least in the context of a simple mathematical model, we combine the technical and conceptual virtues of decoherence (which fails to solve the measurement problem but launches the key idea that perturbations may come from the environment) with those of dynamical collapse models à la grw (which do solve the measurement problem but are ad hoc), without sharing their drawbacks: single measurement outcomes are obtained (instead of merely diagonal reduced density matrices), and no modification of quantum mechanics is needed. (shrink)

In this paper I introduce a broader context, and sketch an integrated account with the purpose of examining the significance of Neurath’s attention to logic in early works and subsequent positions. The specific attention to algebraic logic is important in integrating his own interest in mathematics and combining, since Leibniz, the ideals of a universal language and of a calculus of reasoning. The interest in universal languages constitutes a much broader, so-called tradition of pasigraphy that extended beyond philosophical projects. I (...) argue that Neurath’s works can be embedded in a richer intellectual landscape that includes developments in logic and their local reception in Vienna, and that his attention to logic developed a sustained symbolic standpoint – with semiotic and typographic expressions –; that specific aspects of the work in algebraic logic became a standard and a resource in subsequent work often thought independent, while its value was steadily challenged by the separate goal of empirical theorizing and practical application in social domains – including in the areas of economics, history and visual communication –; that, in particular, the presentation of systems of algebraic logic by Neurath’s sources such as Stanley Jevons and Schröder was not isolated from discussions of political economy; and finally that some of his positions in matters of language, unity and epistemology in the articulation of logical empiricism and its debates are better understood in terms of shared but diversified acquaintance with pasigraphy, formal standards and logical projects. (shrink)

What’s important about ‘coming out’? Why do we wear business suits or Star Trek pins? Part of the answer, we think, has to do with what we call agential identity. Social metaphysics has given us tools for understanding what it is to be socially positioned as a member of a particular group and what it means to self-identify with a group. But there is little exploration of the general relationship between self-identity and social position. We take up this exploration, developing (...) an account of agential identity—the self-identities we make available to others. Agential identities are the bridge between what we take ourselves to be and what others take us to be. Understanding agential identity not only fills an important gap in the literature, but also helps us explain politically important phenomena concerning discrimination, malicious identities, passing, and code-switching. These phenomena, we argue, cannot be understood solely in terms of self-identity or social position. (shrink)

When the fuzzy indeterminacy of quantum mechanics overthrew the orderly world of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger were at the forefront of the revolution. Neither man was ever satisfied with the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, however, and both rebelled against what they considered the most preposterous aspect of quantum mechanics: its randomness. Einstein famously quipped that God does not play dice with the universe, and Schrödinger constructed his famous fable of a cat that was neither alive nor (...) dead not to explain quantum mechanics but to highlight the apparent absurdity of a theory gone wrong. But these two giants did more than just criticize: they fought back, seeking a Theory of Everything that would make the universe seem sensible again. In Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat, physicist Paul Halpern tells the little-known story of how Einstein and Schrödinger searched, first as collaborators and then as competitors, for a theory that transcended quantum weirdness. This story of their quest—which ultimately failed—provides readers with new insights into the history of physics and the lives and work of two scientists whose obsessions drove its progress. Today, much of modern physics remains focused on the search for a Theory of Everything. As Halpern explains, the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson makes the Standard Model—the closest thing we have to a unified theory— nearly complete. And while Einstein and Schrödinger failed in their attempt to explain everything in the cosmos through pure geometry, the development of string theory has, in its own quantum way, brought this idea back into vogue. As in so many things, even when they were wrong, Einstein and Schrödinger couldn’t help but get a great deal right. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the Spanish War, the Catalan philosopher Eugeni d'Ors and the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset offered a reading of Einstein’s theory of relativity in which discussions of unity and plurality connected their respective synthetic philosophies and nationalist projects of political and cultural analysis and reform. Besides their philosophical views, references to Einstein tracked their territorial concerns and personal circumstances in the relations between Catalonia, Spain and Europe. Einstein’s theory symbolized the saving connection between the classical (...) and the modern, Europe and the Mediterranean, and science and philosophy. In this paper I focus on the case of Ors in relation to Catalan nationalism and the project he called Noucentismeand the case of Ortega in relation to Spanish nationalism and his political philosophy in España Invertebrada. (shrink)

This article challenges the restrictive association of critical theory with the Frankfurt School by exploring the differential reception of Hegel by German critical thinkers on both sides of the Iron Curtain after 1945. In the West, Theodor Adorno held Hegelian ‘identity thinking’ partly responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism. Meanwhile in the East, Ernst Bloch turned Hegel into a weapon against the communist regime. The difference between Adorno and Bloch’s positions is shown to turn on the relationship between speculation, (...) dialectics and critique. Whereas for Adorno Hegelian speculation was the root of dangerous identity thinking, Bloch saw the repression of speculative thought as a cornerstone of totalitarianism. However, it is argued that ultimately Bloch and Adorno were united in their reception of Hegel by a shared understanding that the goal of critical theory, namely the transformation of the social totality, could not be achieved without utopian speculation. (shrink)

Previous discussions of Robb’s work on space and time have offered a philosophical focus on causal interpretations of relativity theory or a historical focus on his use of non-Euclidean geometry, or else ignored altogether in discussions of relativity at Cambridge. In this paper I focus on how Robb’s work made contact with those same foundational developments in mathematics and with their applications. This contact with applications of new mathematical logic at Göttingen and Cambridge explains the transition from his electron research (...) to his treatment of relativity in 1911 and finally to the axiomatic presentation in 1914 in terms of postulates. At the heart of Robb’s physical optics was the model of the light cone. The model underwent a transition from a working mechanical model in the Maxwellian Cambridge sense of a pedagogical and research tool to the semantic model, in the logical, model-theoretic sense. Robb tracked this transition from the 19th- to the 20th-century conception with the earliest use of the term ‘model’ in the new sense. I place his cone models in a genealogy of similar models and use their evolution to track how Robb’s physical researches were informed by his interest in geometry, logic and the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

This article consists of an original translation of Ernst Bloch’s 1923 review of Lukács History and Class Consciousness, preceded by a translator’s introduction contextualising Bloch’s review and interpreting what it tells us about the intellectual and personal relationship between Bloch and Lukács. I argue that Bloch’s review highlights some of the key differences and points of intersection between their thinking. Written when their personal relationship had already soured for both political and intellectual reasons, Bloch’s review makes clear his ongoing commitment (...) to a form of utopianism Lukács had long abandoned. Unlike Lukács, who in History and Class Consciousness argued that the dialectical method could only be applied to the social realm, Bloch followed Engels in developing a dialectics of nature. However, even if Bloch was less willing to become involved in party politics than his erstwhile friend, as the review reveals, both men ultimately emphasised the present moment as the privileged locus of urgent political action. (shrink)

One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927–1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of (...) their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below. (shrink)