nciple. But in its generalised form, "being is prior to thinking", this principle is one which must necessarily be observed in assembling information, because not to do so is to introduce uninformative fancies in principle unverifiable. In that respect it differs from Marx's formulation of the basic law of development of human society, which dealt with the particular way in which men live by developing a mode of production.
Thus Engels, with complete consistency, said on the one hand that laws of dialectics are "laws of thought", and on the other (in the preface to Anti‑Dühring) that "there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it". He went on to say that "the revolution which is being forced on natural science by the mere need to set in order the purely empirical discoveries . . . must bring the dialectical character of natural events more and more to the consciousness even of those empiricists who are most opposed to it . . . It is possible to reach this standpoint because the accumulated facts of natural science compel us to do so; but we reach it more easily if we approach the dialectical character of these facts equipped with the consciousness of the laws of dialectical thought."
SOURCE: Cornforth, Maurice. Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy. 2nd ed. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967 (orig. 1965). Part III, chapter 2, pp. 285-302.
Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy: Contents
Science and Evaluation by Maurice Cornforth
Logical Empiricism by Maurice Cornforth
Vienna Circle, Karl Popper, Frankfurt School, Marxism, McCarthyism & American Philosophy: Selected Bibliography
Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide
Salvaging Soviet Philosophy (1)
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