Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Fichte and Schelling
- Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the ‘Doctrine of Essence’
- Schopenhauer's Pessimism
- Karl Marx
- Nietzsche's Virtues: A Personal Inquiry
- Bolzano, Brentano and Meinong: Three Austrian Realists
- Vorsprung durch Logik: The German Analytic Tradition
- German Philosophy of Mathematics from Gauss to Hilbert
- The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?
- Husserl's Concept of Being: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics
- Frege and the Later Wittgenstein
- Otto Neurath, the Vienna Circle and the Austrian Tradition
- Does the Nothing Noth?
- Reactionary Modernism
- Adorno on Disenchantment: The Scepticism of Enlightened Reason
- Habermas, Science and Modernity
- German Philosophy Today: Between Idealism, Romanticism, and Pragmatism
- The Career of Aesthetics in German Thinking
- Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy. Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn?
- Index of Names
Karl Marx
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Fichte and Schelling
- Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the ‘Doctrine of Essence’
- Schopenhauer's Pessimism
- Karl Marx
- Nietzsche's Virtues: A Personal Inquiry
- Bolzano, Brentano and Meinong: Three Austrian Realists
- Vorsprung durch Logik: The German Analytic Tradition
- German Philosophy of Mathematics from Gauss to Hilbert
- The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?
- Husserl's Concept of Being: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics
- Frege and the Later Wittgenstein
- Otto Neurath, the Vienna Circle and the Austrian Tradition
- Does the Nothing Noth?
- Reactionary Modernism
- Adorno on Disenchantment: The Scepticism of Enlightened Reason
- Habermas, Science and Modernity
- German Philosophy Today: Between Idealism, Romanticism, and Pragmatism
- The Career of Aesthetics in German Thinking
- Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy. Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn?
- Index of Names
Summary
Although it was, until recently, unfashionable in certain circles to say this, Marx was not a philosopher in any interesting sense. He was a social theorist. As social theory, I am thinking primarily of two areas (in all social theory, there is also a large body of empirical work, which I am not competent to comment upon): (a) the methodology of social inquiry, and its metaphysical presuppositions, and (b) normative philosophy (ethics and political theory).
Many social theorists are also philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel and Mill provide good examples. They articulate and develop a general philosophy, a metaphysics and an epistemology, and typically their social theory relies in essential ways on that general philosophy, or at any rate they believe that it does. There is a connection, for example, between Mill's empiricism, on the one hand, and, on the other, both his utilitarian philosophy, and the methodology of social science that he outlines in Book VI of his A System of Logic.
Marx also believed that his social theory depended on certain philosophical assumptions, but, unlike these aforementioned social theorists, he does not, for the most part, articulate or develop in any significant way the philosophy on which he believes his social theory depends.
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- German Philosophy since Kant , pp. 65 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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