Alternatives to Positivism

A Soviet philosopher of science takes on the Anglo-American tradition, and reads every one of his opponents in the original.

Karl Popper is named two hundred and seventy-six times, and every quotation comes from Popper himself: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Conjectures and Refutations, The Poverty of Historicism, Objective Knowledge in two printings, and The Self and Its Brain, written with John Eccles. Carnap is read in five separate works. Quine appears through Word and Object, From a Logical Point of View, and the Philosophical Review printing of Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Kuhn is quoted with pages from the 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, alongside Feyerabend's Against Method, Lakatos, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Schlick in the German. Adorno and Marcuse are footnoted to their German editions. Roy Bhaskar's realist theory of science appears within a year or two of publication.

The proportions are the striking thing. Of roughly a hundred and thirty-five source-bearing footnotes, six go to Soviet or Russian-language work, and Lenin is cited four times. Everything else is Western, in the original, at first hand.

Whatever one concludes about the verdicts, this is a genuine engagement with logical positivism and its critics by someone who had done the reading, and it is among the most substantial Soviet treatments of twentieth-century philosophy of science available in English.

Translated by Vladimir Stankevich.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.