Tom Rockmore

Given the apparent differences in the two positions, it is not surprising that the relation between the philosophies of Fichte and Marx seems never to have been studied in depth. Books on Fichte rarely mention Marx. Conversely, works about Marx usually avoid the name of Fichte, except occasionally to mention the attraction Fichte’s thought held for the young Hegelians. Further, historians of philosophy, even those interested in the conceptual development of problems such as Windelband, do not seem to have noticed any relation worth considering in the two positions.

For Martin Heidegger the "fall" of philosophy into metaphysics begins with Plato. Thus, the relationship between the two philosophers is crucial to an understanding of Heidegger--and, perhaps, even to the whole plausibility of postmodern critiques of metaphysics. It is also, as the essays in this volume attest, highly complex, and possibly founded on a questionable understanding of Plato. As editors Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore remark, a simple way to describe Heidegger's reading of Plato might be to say that what began as an attempt to appropriate Plato (and through him a large portion of Western philosophy) finally ended in an estrangement from both Plato and Western philosophy. The authors of this volume consider Heidegger's thought in relation to Plato before and after the " Kehre " or turn. In doing so, they take up various central issues in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and thereafter, and the questions of hermeneutics, truth, and language. The result is a subtle and multifaceted reinterpretation of Heidegger's position in the tradition of philosophy, and of Plato's role in determining that position.

At the present time, Europe, particularly eastern Europe, is still immersed in a major political transformation, the most significant such change since the Second World War, arising out of the rejection of official Marxism. This unforeseen rejection requires meditation by all those concerned with the relation of philosophy to the historical context. Marxism, that follows Marx’s insistence on the link between a theory and the context in which it arises, cannot be indifferent to the rejection of Marxist theory in practice. In respect to the usual tendency to pass rapidly over practice for a theoretical analysis of social theory, Merleau-Ponty stands out for his concern to evaluate the theoretical claims of Marx and Marxism against practice.

A systematic and historical study of the rela­tion of the positions of Fichte and Marx within the context of nineteenth-century German philosophy as well as the wider his­tory of philosophy. Rockmore’s thesis is that there is a little noticed, less often studied, but nevertheless profound structural parallel between the two positions that can be shown to be mediated through the development of the nineteenth-century German philosophical tradition. Both positions understand man in anti-Car­tesian fashion, not as a spectator, but as an active being. Rockmore demonstrates that there is similarity of the two views of activity in terms of the Aristotelian concept __,_ _then indicates the further parallel be­tween the respective concepts of man that fol­low from Fichte’s and Marx’s views of activity. Turning to the history of philosophy, Rockmore directs the reader to solid textual evidence supporting the influence of Fichte, not only on Marx’s Young Hegelian contem­poraries but on Marx as well. He argues that the Hegelian impact on the interpretation of the nineteenth-century philosophical tradi­tion has served to obscure the parallel be­tween the positions of Fichte and Marx, but that the concept of man as an active being can be used to reinterpret this segment of the history of philosophy and to modify the fre­quently held view of the classical German tradition as a collection of rather disparate thinkers. Finally, he provides a discussion of the intrinsic value of the anti-Cartesian ap­proach to man as such

Este trabajo recorre el constructivismo epistemológico de Vico. Por "constructivismo" se entiende la visión de que el objeto cognitivo no es algo simplemente dado sino en cierto modo "construido" por el sujeto como una condición de conocimiento. Se piensa que en este camino Vico figura como uno de los más importantes innovadores epistemológicos de los tiempos modernos. Vico entendió que, no pudiendo nosotros conocer independientemente la realidad, las condiciones de conocimiento son entonces, de algún modo, formas de constructivismo. De esta manera anticipó cualquier forma posterior de constructivismo, entre otras: la conocida revolución copernicana de Kant.This paper is a review of Vico’s epistemological constructivism. By "constructivism" is understood the view that the congnitive object is not a simple given but rather in some way "constructed" by the subject as a condition of knowledge. It is believed that in this way Vico set the stage for one of the most important epistemological innovations in modern times. Vico grasped that, since we cannot know independent reality, the conditions of knowledge is some form of constructivism. He anticipated thus all later forms of constructivism, including inter alia: Kant’s better known Copernican revolution