Tom Rockmore

The link between empiricism and realism is crucially important in analytic philosophy. Empiricism is roughly the claim that knowledge must arise out of experience; it cannot, as Descartes thought, be innate. Realism is roughly the associated claim that whatever thought refers to is real, in a word, exists, independently of the mind. However, idealism (or idealism as understood by analytic philosophers) not only violates the rigorous philosophical standards that analytical philosophy has always claimed to exemplify, but undermines empiricism (which in turn depends on realism) as well. For this reason, analytic philosophers particularly view idealism as the official enemy. This paper will consider the place of idealism in recent analytic debate.

In the Communist Manifesto, in a famous boutade, Marx and Engels claimed that capitalism was in the process of bringing forth its own gravediggers. This assertion may once have been true. But lately it has seemed less likely as a description of contemporary society which, for all its problems, appears surprisingly robust. Although capitalism has its problems, and perhaps cannot be said to exist now in the sense that it was described by Marx and Engels, as a social system it has always exhibited the kind of staying power which cast doubt on the theory which predicted its demise. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that, for numerous reasons which cannot be cited here, in recent years Marxism has been digging its own grave as the results of the theory in practice become more widely known.

It makes sense to ask from time to time where we are in the philosophical discussion. This article reviews the debate in the twentieth century. Michael Friedman has recently argued that the split between Continental and analytic philosophy is due to the inability, because of war, to carry forward a genuine debate begun by Heidegger and Carnap around the time of Heidegger's public controversy with Cassirer at Davos in 1929. I, however, argue that there was not even the beginning of a genuine debate between Heidegger and Carnap. I argue further that the split between analytic and Continental philosophy originated earlier, in the analytic attack on idealism at the beginning of the century. And finally, I argue that the differences among analytic philosophy, Continental philosophy, and pragmatism, the third main current of twentieth-century philosophy, can be traced to differing reactions to Kant

This article examines two views about the capitalism that lies at the heart of modern industrial society. We owe to Marx and Piketty two large-scale, hugely important, but very different studies of the nature of modern industrial capitalism. In Capital, Marx provides a complex analysis of the anatomy of modern industrial capitalism, which he regards not as stable but rather as over time unstable and tending toward internal collapse on several grounds, of which the most important is apparently the so-called tendency of the falling rate of profit. The falling rate of profit supposedly threatens its continued existence. Piketty criticizes the latter view in the context of his theory of contemporary capitalism. The article suggests, first, that Marx's view of the falling rate of interest is empirically implausible but Piketty's rival claim is empirically plausible. Second, a successful transition from capitalism to communism on Marxian grounds is unlikely in practice. And finally, despite Marx's intentions, it is unlikely to realize itself in practice, and is in this respect a traditional theory.