Helena Sheehan > Quotes

“Even Lenin, who learned far more from non-Marxist ideas and was far more broad-minded than the subsequent generation of Russian Marxists, was notoriously unfair to Mach and Bogdanov.”
― Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History

“Despite such significant departures from the antimetaphysical and ahistorical heritage of the Vienna Circle, it still cannot be said that philosophers of science have yet brought to bear the full weight of the implications of metaphysics or historicity for science.”
― Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History

“This raises a recurring problem in the history of Marxism, i.e., the relation of Marxism to non-Marxist trends. This, it must be said, is a problem that Marxists have not always handled very well. Most have unfortunately gone to the one extreme or the other, either accommodating themselves too far in the direction of recurrences of modes of thought superseded by Marxism and compromising the very distinctiveness of Marxism beyond recognition without sufficient reason for doing so or considering Marxism a closed world, with nothing to learn from other schools of thought and heaping abuse and invective upon anyone who has suggested otherwise.”
― Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History

“Those, such as the early Lukács or the various Marxists of the Second International, who sought to bring back into Marxism the neo-Kantian dichotomy between history and nature, were, it could be argued, reverting to an antithesis already transcended by a higher synthesis.”
― Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History

“This has led, on the one hand, to an unhealthy pressure against creative thinking and to a sterile adherence to fixed formulations. A nearly pathological fear of revisionism has obscured the fact that every tradition with the vitality to endure has revised and must continually revise itself with the onward march of history and with the progressive achievements of human knowledge. Marxists must judge matters on the basis of the evidence, on the basis of truth criteria established by the highest level of development of scientific method at any given time, and not on the basis of conformity or nonconformity to established Marxist premises, no matter how fundamental. Only if its most basic premises are continually scrutinized can the continued affirmation of them be meaningful. Of course, if really basic premises could no longer be affirmed in this way, then it would be legitimate to query whether the new position should still be considered Marxist. But only by being open to this possibility, by following Marx’s own advice to question everything, can Marxism be adhered to and developed in a healthy way.”
― Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History

“The trajectory of this tradition, from positivism to the current variety of postpositivist philosophies of science, has reflected the pressure of a complex reality upon conceptions too restricted to give an adequate account of it. The successive modifications of the tradition over the years, from verificationism to falsification, to the historicism of paradigm shifts, to the methodology of scientific research programs, to methodological dadaism, have been impressive but still inadequate attempts to come to terms with the metaphysical and historical dimensions of science.”
― Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History