The materialist tradition challenges the conventional philosophical understanding that logic is the organon for both science and philosophy. Marx and Engels, building on the materialist tradition that can be traced back to the ancients, inaugurated the direct challenge in the nineteenth century. The dialectic of humanity and nature, they argued, was the matrix of all human culture including its philosophical and logical forms. But as suggestive and compelling as Marx’s and Engels’ bold thesis was, it would fall to twentieth century writers to flesh out the counter-claim that the material world is really the organon for logic. The logician John Dewey, building upon the naturalism and instrumentalism of American pragmatism, theorized the relationship between the continuum of science and the development of logical forms. And Evald Ilyenkov, writing a few decades later, argued that science and logic must conform to the dialectical character of the object world. In Dewey’s writing epistemology is the organon for logic; in Ilyenkov ontology is the organon for logic; and thus in keeping with Marx and Engels both writers see logic as being effectively shaped by the material sphere. Neither writer, however, establishes a clear ontological philosophy commensurate with the claim that the world is dialectical, although Ilyenkov’s writing is much more fecund and suggestive. Building on Ilyenkov, we argue that a theory of entification helps to illuminate claims about the dialectical character of the object world, drawing attention directly to the self-sameness and difference of entities, highlighting their abiding essence and evolutionary character, and so forth. Moreover, we conclude that a clearer philosophy of entification reveals the path through which the material world registers in the upper cultural echelons of science, philosophy, and logic, and helps to show how the dialectical epistemology of Dewey and the dialectical ontology of Ilyenkov complement each other within the materialist tradition.

KEYWORDS: Science, materialism, ontology, dialectic, Marx, logic, entity, Ilyenkov, Dewey.