Empiriomonism

Brill’s Bogdanov Library is publishing David Rowley’s translation of all three volumes of Empiriomonism. bogdanovlibrary

> As an exile in Tula, Bogdanov had been introduced to the thought of the European positivists Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius by way of A.V. Lunacharsky. In their work, he saw the possibility of grounding Marxism in a new philosophical idiom. His attempt to do so – in Empiriomonism (1904-1906) – sparked a heated battle between Neo-Positivist and Hegelian tendencies in Russian Marxism that would follow him for the rest of his revolutionary career.

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BOGDANOV, A, 2020. Empiriomonism: essays in philosophy, books 1-3. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. ISBN 978-1-64259-348-8.

“Empiriomonism is Alexander Bogdanov’s monistic philosophy of being and cognition, which he believed is consistent with both modern science and Marxism. In Books One and Two of Empiriomonism, Bogdanov begins with Ernst Mach’s and Richard Avenarius’s neutral monism - the idea that the ‘physical’ and the ‘psychical’ are two sides of one reality - and explains how human psyches are causally interconnected with the rest of nature. In Book Three, he shows how empiriomonism substantiates the principles of historical materialism more adequately than G.V. Plekhanov’s out-dated materialism. Bogdanov concludes that empiriomonism, although not technically materialist, is nevertheless of the same order as materialist systems and, since it is the ideology of the productive forces of society, it is a Marxist philosophy”--