Reason in Revolt: Dialectical Philosophy and Modern Science. Volume 1

Marxism and the United States......Page 11
The Importance of Dialectics......Page 12
Marxism and Religion......Page 14
The Big Bang......Page 15
Marxism and the Future......Page 17
Authors’ Foreword......Page 21
Engels’ Role......Page 22
1. Introduction......Page 25
Lag in Consciousness......Page 26
“Reason Becomes Unreason”......Page 29
Science and the Crisis of Society......Page 32
Do We Need Philosophy?......Page 35
Role of Religion......Page 37
Division of Labor......Page 42
Materialism and Idealism......Page 45
What is Dialectics?......Page 49
“Everything Flows”......Page 51
Quantity and Quality......Page 53
Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table......Page 56
Phase Transitions......Page 59
Order Out of Chaos......Page 61
Whole and Part......Page 64
Complex Organisms......Page 66
The Molecular Process of Revolution......Page 69
The Unity and Interpenetration of Opposites......Page 71
Positive and Negative......Page 73
Nuclear Fission......Page 75
Polar Opposites?......Page 76
Attraction and Repulsion......Page 78
The Dialectics of Capital......Page 83
4. Formal Logic and Dialectics......Page 87
What is a Syllogism?......Page 91
Does Logic Teach How to Think?......Page 94
Limits of the Law of Identity......Page 95
Logic and the Subatomic World......Page 101
Modern Logic......Page 103
5. Revolution in Physics......Page 109
Waves or Particles?......Page 110
Quantum Mechanics......Page 112
Disappearance of Matter?......Page 113
“Bricks of Matter”?......Page 115
The Uncertainty Principle......Page 117
Objectivity Versus Subjectivism......Page 121
Causality and Chance......Page 124
Mechanism......Page 127
The 19th Century......Page 129
Is Prediction Possible?......Page 133
Hegel on Necessity and Accident......Page 135
Determinism and Chaos......Page 139
Marxism and Freedom......Page 142
What is Time?......Page 144
Time and Philosophy......Page 148
Newton and Hegel......Page 150
Relativity......Page 153
The General Theory of Relativity......Page 156
Relations Between Things......Page 159
The Measurement of Time......Page 162
Problem Not Resolved......Page 165
Idealist Interpretations......Page 167
Mach and Positivism......Page 170
Boltzmann and Time......Page 173
Relativity and Black Holes......Page 177
The Second Law of Thermodynamics......Page 180
Order Out of Chaos......Page 183
Cosmology......Page 187
The Doppler Effect......Page 189
How the Theory Evolved......Page 190
The “Inflation” Theory......Page 193
Dark Matter?......Page 194
The Neutrino to the Rescue!......Page 197
Constant Headaches, or Hubble Trouble......Page 201
This is the End.......Page 205
A “Plasma Universe”?......Page 206
Einstein and the Big Bang......Page 209
Neutron Stars......Page 210
Stephen Hawking......Page 213
Do Singularities Exist?......Page 217
An Empty Abstraction......Page 221
Thoughts in a Vacuum......Page 225
The Origins of the Solar System......Page 229
NOTES PART TWO......Page 233
An Epoch-making Discovery......Page 235
The Puzzle of the Missing Genes......Page 236
“Race Has No Meaning in Science”......Page 240
Creationism Exploded......Page 242
Science and Dialectics......Page 243
The Human Genome and Big Business......Page 246
Limitless Possibilities......Page 249
A Tribute to a Great Scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, Who Died on May 20, 2002......Page 255
Bibliography......Page 259
Glossary of Terms......Page 263