Lawrence Krader’s Thought Development

The Development of Lawrence Krader’s Thought

From Philosophy to Empirical Anthropology to Noetics

This posting presents the development of Krader’s intellectual contributions over the course of his life.

We identify four periods of his development as follows:

1. His undergraduate years at the City College of New York and the University of Chicago in philosophy, the history of philosophy and mathematical logic.
2. His years as a student of anthropology and linguistics and as a researcher and teacher in these disciplines and his work in empirical anthropology in Central Asia.
3. His theoretical writings centered around his transcription of Karl Marx’s ethnological notebooks and the various publications following the appearance of the notebooks.
4. His lifelong work on Noetics, published posthumously in 2010, in which, he revised his previous theoretical work in a way signified best by the German term Aufhebung. It will be argued here that his work on Noetics represents a significant departure from Krader’s earlier evolutionism which has to be returned to the context of its origins in the wake of Darwin’s paradigmatic work The Origin of Species in 1859.