Positivist Science Quotes

“Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationship
between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility of
identification of the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is found
in those concrete-scientific ideas about the constitution of matter (about the
‘physical’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and in natural scientific generalizations
of these ideas that are inevitably turn out to be historically limited, changing,
subject to reconsideration by the natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism is found in the acceptance of the objective reality that exists independently of human cognition and that is only reflected in it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the ‘philosophical conclusions derived from the newest discoveries of natural science’ is, according to Lenin, found not in the reconsideration of this essence and not in making the ideas
of natural scientists eternal, but in the deepening of the understanding of the
‘relationship between cognition and the physical world’ that is connected with
these new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationship
between the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and therefore, the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialectical
materialism”
― Evald Ilyenkov, Intelligent Materialism: Essays on Hegel and Dialectics