Adam Schaff

[A.R.Amistad]

Is anyone familiar with Adam Schaff? I've read snippets on him but I can't find any of his works anywhere. Can anybody help?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

The only work of his that I know is an essay he wrote on contradiction:

Schaff, A. (1960), 'Marxist Dialectics And The Principle Of Contradiction', Journal of Philosophy 57, pp.241-50.

But he makes all the usual mistakes -- uncritically swallowing far too much Hegel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Schaff

http://www.generation-online.org/p/pschaff.htm

Biography:

http://www.erich-fromm.de/biophil/joomla/images/stories/pdf-Dateien/Bierhoff_B_2008a.pdf

Part of one his essays:

http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpschaff1.htm

Books by:

http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL266735A/Adam_Schaff

[JimFar]

Schaff was basically the house philosopher of the Polish CP. probably because at the time that the Communists took power in Poland he was one of the few professionally trained philosophers who was a Communist. He was always close to the center of power in Poland. In the 1980s he was a close adviser to Jaruzelski. His role within the Poland's Communist regime was thus ambiguous. On the one hand he made efforts to promote dialogue between Marxist and non-Marxist currents of thought. In the early 1950s when the government undertook a purge of non-Marxist philosophers from the universities, Schaff got many of the purged philosophers jobs under the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, so they could continue to draw paychecks. Later on many of these people were able to return to Polish academic life. Within philosophy he encouraged Polish Marxists to dialogue with absorb insights from the analytical school on the one hand, and from the phenomenological and existentialist schools on the other hand. He was a leading promoter of "humanist" Marxism in the 1960s when he gained international fame.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Jim. I was hoping you'd see this thread, since I knew you'd know.:)

[bie]

...among other things he was one of those people who were saying that the working class will seize to exist due to the technological progress itself ie. automation of labour and that socialism can be introduced through the parliamentary elections.