Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio.

I have a wonderful, exciting, wide-spanning episode for you today.

I have my friend Matthew Furlong on to talk about the history of dialectics, the philosophy,

the practice, the pedagogy, tracing its lineage back to Heraclitus, to Taoism using

figures like Jesus to make sense of it, tracing it through thinkers like Descartes and Spinoza

and ending on figures like Angela Davis and Foucault through Marx and Lenin and with the

heavy emphasis, of course, on Mao.

So this is a huge, fascinating, whirlwind of an episode and you do not need to listen to

other episodes necessarily to engage with this one first or in any sequence, but as I mentioned

in the episode, we do have our episode with Torco Lawson on the principal contradiction,

which I'll link to in the show notes and our episode with Todd McGowan on Hageleon dialectics,

which I'll also link to in the show notes.

And those might be some places if you want to set up this conversation, which is I think

a deeper dive than we covered in those or if you'd like to listen to this one first and

go back to those, I'll make sure they're all in the show notes so you can deepen your understanding

of this stuff and of course at the end, he gives some more recommendations as well.

Definitely going to have Matthew back on to talk about other topics.

He really is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to this stuff and a really unique

and creative thinker.

So we'll get into this episode, you know, as a kind of funny aside, I didn't mention

this to him and I hope this doesn't offend him by any means, but he does kind of sound

like Neil deGrasse Tyson, a much smarter, more philosophically informed version of Neil

...