Tom Rockmore

The importance of Lukács’ interpretation of classical German philosophy and Marx is almost self-evident. Although Marxists are frequently content to dismiss with contempt a philosophical tradition with which they display scant acquaintance, Lukács’ knowledge of philosophy is obviously extensive. His writings contain what is perhaps the most detailed discussion of the history of philosophy from a Marxist perspective. Further, his influence on the interpretation of Marx has been unequaled over the course of more than fifty years, ever since the appearance of his epoch-making book, History and Class Consciousness. A case in point is provided by Sartre’s and Habermas’ respective attempts to reconstruct Marx’s position. Although the proposed reconstructions are vastly different, they are alike in their dependence on Lukács’ interpretation of Marx.

Fichte, qui s’est lui-même présenté comme kantien orthodoxe, et a même prétendu être le seul qui ait compris correctement la philosophie critique, nous a entraînés en fait dans une interprétation qui pourrait être fourvoyante. Bien qu’évidemment clairement inspiré par Kant, bien qu’il parvienne à la vie philosophique dans un climat entièrement dominé par le débat autour du criticisme, ses solutions sont entièrement différentes de celles de Kant. L’Auteur s’attache à montrer ces différences et à explorer les voies que Fichte développe contre Kant, voies qui demeurent encore actuelles et font l’objet de débats contemporains.

There is an obvious distinction between the philosophical meditation on politics and relevance to politics, on the one hand, and the political engagement of philosophers and even philosophy, on the other. At this late date, there can be few people interested in philosophy, and even many uninterested in this ancient discipline, unaware that Martin Heidegger turned to Nazism in the 1930s. Heidegger, who all his life subscribed to the Platonic view of the priority of philosophy over politics, later described his own political turning as “die grösste Dummheit,” in short as an error. This paper will consider recent discussion of this instance of “stupidity,” with special attention to three books: Julian Young, Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism; Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias; and Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time.

The debate over foundationalism, the viewpoint that there exists some secure foundation upon which to build a system of knowledge, appears to have been resolved and the antifoundationalists have at least temporarily prevailed. From a firmly historical approach, the book traces the foundationalism/antifoundationalism controversy in the work of many important figures Animaxander, Aristotle and Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Hegel and Nietzsche, Habermas and Chisholm, and others throughout the history of philosophy. The contributors, Joseph Margolis, Ronald Polansky, Gary Calore, Fred and Emily Michael, William Wurzer, Charlene Haddock Siegfried, Sandra B. Rosenthal, Kathleen Wallace, and the editors present well the diversity, interest, and roots of antifoundationalism. Tom Rockmore is Professor and Chairman in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University. Beth J. Singer is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

The purpose of this paper is to study bertram wolfe's views of marx and marxism, and in particular to call attention to his insistence on the basic ambiguity of the classical doctrines and the exploitation of that ambiguity within differing concepts of marxist orthodoxy. i suggest that the importance of wolfe's views of marx and marxism lies less in the specific theses he advances or in the details of his discussion. in opposition to the more usual approach to marxism as a unified phenomenon, wolfe stands nearly alone in the analytical form of his historical approach, in which emphasis lies less in the depiction of a synthetic vision than in the patient, historical analysis of the chronological evolution of marx's position, classical marxism, and the wider marxist tradition

It has sometimes erroneously been thought that theory of knowledge worthy of the name, or even epistemology as such comes to an end with Kant. This view is an error, since there are profound views of knowledge in the post-Kantian philosophical tradition, including that in Hegel’s thought. Now epistemology is a wide topic that includes a variety of themes. One of the main themes in the theory of knowledge in modern philosophy, especially in recent years, has been the issue of foundationalism. The idea of foundationalism has been understood in different ways. But for purposes of this discussion, I will understand “foundationalism” to mean “some form of the Cartesian approach to philosophy through a self-justifying first principle.” In this paper, I will provide a brief, critical study of the theme of foundationalism in the Science of Logic. The aim of my discussion is to point to an unresolved tension between Hegel’s general commitment to epistemological circularity as the appropriate strategy for knowledge and the linear form of argument in this book.