• Corpus ID: 44018592

Ernst Mayr Roots of Dialectical Materialism *

@inproceedings{Mayr2005ErnstMR,
  title={Ernst Mayr Roots of Dialectical Materialism *},
  author={Ernst Mayr},
  year={2005}
}

• E. Mayr
• Published 2005
• Philosophy

I have been as puzzled about this comment as Zavadsky was about my writings. What I was puzzled about was, which of my ideas or concepts were considered by Zavadsky to be so close to those of the dialectical materialists. I have been wondering about this for the past 30 years and I think I have gradually come close to an answer. In this I have been helped by a number of publications, particularly those of Engels (1), Levins and Lewontin (2), and Loren Graham (3, 4). I eventually discovered that I had at least six beliefs more of less shared by most dialectical materialists (See below). I particularly benefited from the Selsam-Martel Reader, which provides lengthy excerpts from the writings of Engels and other Marxist theoreticians. In order to understand dialectical materialism, one must study its history. It was developed by Engels and Marx, but mostly by Engels, by accepting the historical approach of Hegel but rejecting Hegel's essentialism and physicalism. Indeed Engels states this quite concretely when he says, "we comprehended the concepts in our heads once more materialistically — as images of real things instead of regarding the real things as images of this or that stage of development of the absolute concept." (1). In spite of his historical approach Hegel's thinking was in most respects strongly Cartesian (physicalist) and this was the part rejected by Marx and Engels. How evolutionary their thinking was they probably