Maurice Cornforth

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Maurice Campbell Cornforth (1909 – 1980) was a British Marxist philosopher. Initially, he was in the early 1930s a follower of Wittgenstein, writing in the style of the analytic philosophy of the time. He later became in effect the official ideologist of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

He is noted for his attack on the aesthetic theories of Christopher Caudwell, and for his later partial engagement with the linguistic philosophy of Oxford origin of the 1940s and 1960s. He also wrote a defence of Marxism against Karl Popper's criticisms.

His book In Defense of Philosophy attacks, in their (supposedly damaging) relationship to science, empiricist philosophies of many kinds, then dominant in the West, such as those of Rudolf Carnap (linguistic analysis) and William James (pragmatism), on the "materialist" grounds that they divorce science and scientific investigation from the search for truer understanding of the really existing universe. In this book there is a combination of Marxist with deep insights into the interrelations of the various sciences and the philosophical conundrums produced by the empiricist attempt to reduce science to the collection and correlation of data. Both the insights are based on the theory of the primacy of physical work and tools (thus, "materialism") in the development of specifically human traits such as language, abstract thought, and social organization, and the essential role of the external world in the increasingly complex development of forms of life. These latter ideas are remarkably consistent with the most current evolutionary thinking in biology and anthropology, even while couched in language that can be Stalinist.

[edit] Works

  • Food and farming for victory, Communist party pamphlet
  • Science Versus Idealism: An Examination of "Pure Empiricism" and Modern Logic (1946)
  • Dialectical materialism and science (1949)
  • In Defense of Philosophy - Against Positivism and Pragmatism (1950)
  • Science for Peace and Socialism (c.1950) with J. D. Bernal
  • Dialectical Materialism (1952) Vol 1: Materialism & the Dialectical Method, Vol 2 : Historical Materialism, Vol 3 : Theory of Knowledge, and later editions
  • Readers' Guide to the Marxist Classics (1952)
  • Rumanian Summer: A View of the Rumanian People's Republic (1953) with Jack Lindsay
  • Philosophy for Socialists (1959)
  • Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965)
  • The Open Philosophy and the Open Society: A Reply to Dr. Karl Popper's Refutations of Marxism (1968)
  • Communism and Human Values (1972)
  • Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in honour of A. L. Morton (1978) editor
  • Communism & Philosophy: Contemporary Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism (1980)
Languages