Abstract:
This manuscript was assembled in the course of the 198889 academic year while completing an undergraduate research fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Paul Hamori. In examining the dialectical materialism of V.I. Lenin, as expounded in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, an attempt was made to provide the reader with a brief, yet thorough synopsis of the main arguments of the work so as to present Lenin's philosophy with greater clarity and brevity than was the case in the original work. While Lenin's impact upon the world has been tremendous, and his ideas once commanded an immense following, many of the works in which he expressed his ideas were written with a specific audience in mind and dealt with issues and controversies which were peculiar to his age. In addition, it is probably fair to say that Lenin's skills as a political agitator were superior to his skills as a writer. Consequently, the project which culminated in the completion of this manuscript posed a number of challenges.In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin's presentation of his theses ranges from obscure to redundant, and the contemporary reader is often hard pressed to understand subtle references which were undoubtedly common knowledge in the circle of Russian emigres in which Lenin moved in the early 1900's, but which can be difficult to make sense of out of historical context. In addition, Lenin's treatment of the problems of philosophy is loaded with political relevance. Indeed, it may be said that Materialism and Empirio-Criticism represents not as much a treatise on philosophy as a manifesto of what its author believed Marxist philosophy should be.
