Tom Rockmore

"[These] essays together form an extraordinary response, and radical but not self-righteous challenge, to Heidegger's unambiguous complicity with Hitler and Nazism....This book will provoke intense dialogue and controversy about issues which, for too long, too many philosophers have chosen either to gloss over or ignore." --Ronald E. Santoni The relation between Martin Heidegger's philosophical thought and his political commitment has been widely discussed in recent years, following the publication of Victor Farías's controversial study, Heidegger and Nazism, published in this country by Temple University Press. The Heidegger Case is a collection of original essays, by both American and European philosophers, on issues raised by Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis. The contributors consider such matters as the relationship between Heidegger's philosophical theories and his public statements and activities, the ways in which his ideas on social and political life compare with those of other philosophers, and the role of philosophy with respect to politics.

This paper has two main aims. First, it examines the relation of Russian and Chinese Marxism against its Hegelian background. Secondly, it comments on recent Western research on Marxism in tracing the origins of Engels’s anti-Hegelianism to materialist reactions to modern idealist philosophy. I maintain that Engels is a Schellingian, that Marx is a Hegelian, and that Marx’s form of Hegelianism cannot be realized in practice. I consider different kinds of Marxism as efforts to realize Marx’s theories and argue that, since Marx’s theory cannot be realized, in the final analysis his view is no more than a dream.

In After Parmenides, Tom Rockmore takes us all the way back to the beginning of philosophy. Parmenides held that thought and being are one: what we know is what is. For Rockmore, this established both the good view that we should think of the world in terms of what the mind constructs as knowable entities as well as the bad view that there is some non-mind-dependent "thing"-the world, the real-which we can know or fail to know. No, Rockmore says: what we need to do is give up on the idea that there is any extra-mental "real" for us to know. We know and become acquainted with the objects of cognition that our mind constructs. After Parmenides illustrates the contest between variants of the "standard" view and variants of the "non-standard, constructivist view" in the history of philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, post-Kantians including Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Marx, the early pragmatists, analytic philosophy, contemporary French speculative realism, and more. This ambitious but accessibly written book shows how new connections can be made in the history of philosophy when it is reread through a new lens.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Contributors -- Introduction -- 1 The Concepts of Physics: Rational Contents and Constructions in History -- 2 Theory-change and the Logic of Enquiry: New Bearings in Philosophy of Science -- 3 Science, History and Philosophy in Kant and Hegel -- 4 Historicity, Social Psychology and Change -- 5 The Reality of History -- 6 The Social Location of Scientific Practices -- 7 Kuhn, Different Worlds and Science as Historical -- 8 Incommensurability Modestly Recovered -- Index.

We ignore the history of philosophy at our peril. Engels, who typically conflates Marx and Marxism, points to the relation of Marxism to the tradition while also denying it. In his little book on Feuerbach, Engels depicts Feuerbach as leading Marx away from Hegel, away from classical German philosophy, away from philosophy and towards materialism and science. This view suggests that Marx is at best negatively related to Classical German philosophy, including Hegel. Yet Engels elsewhere suggests that Marx belongs to the classical German philosophical tradition. In the preface to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels wrote: “We German socialists are proud that we trace our descent not only from Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte and Hegel”. In this paper I will focus on Marx’s relation to Fichte. This relation is rarely mentioned in the Marxist debate, but I will argue, it is crucial for the formulation of Marx’s position, and hence for assessing his contribution accurately. One of the results of this study will be to indicate that Marx, in reacting against Hegel, did not, as is often suggested, ‘leave’ philosophy, but in fact made a crucial philosophical contribution.

In this engaging and accessible introduction to Hegel's theory of knowledge, Tom Rockmore brings together the philosopher's life, his thought, and his historical moment--without, however, reducing one to another. Laying out the philosophical tradition of German idealism, Rockmore concisely explicates the theories of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, essential to an understanding of Hegel's thought. He then explores Hegel's formulation of his own position in relation to this tradition and follows Hegel's ideas through the competing interpretations of his successors. Even today, according to Rockmore, Hegel's system remains an essentially modern conception of knowledge, superior to Kant's critical philosophy and surprisingly relevant to our philosophical situation. Rockmore's remarkably lucid and succinct introduction to Hegel's thought, with its distinctively historical approach, will benefit students of philosophy, intellectual history, politics, culture, and society.

This paper concerns the nature and a significance of metaphilosophy with special attention to German idealism. Metaphilosophy, or the philosophy of philosophy, is understood differently from different perspectives, for instance, if philosophy concerns the consciousness of the object, as the self-consciousness of the knowing process. If we assume that the Western philosophical tradition consists in a long series of efforts to demonstrate claims to know, then metaphilosophy is not present in the ancient Greek tradition. It only arises in the modern tradition through the turn from a theory of knowledge that depends on consciousness, more precisely consciousness of the independent object, to a theory of knowledge that depends on self-consciousness, more precisely consciousness of the independent object as well as consciousness of consciousness of the independent object.

This intellectually discomfiting, disturbingly provocative, yet still thoroughly scholarly Handbook reproduces the intellectual ferment that accompanied the Russian Revolution including the wholly polarising effect at that time of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy does not settle for one safe interpretation of the thought of this world-historic figure but rather revels in a clash of viewpoints. Most interestingly it presents a contrast between the Western editors who emphasise pure democracy and Marxian humanism with many of the contributing scholars who take a more sanguine view of the Leninist political project. Perhaps reflecting the current Western political crisis, some of the volume’s other European and North American scholars more closely align with their colleagues from the Global South. Key Features: · Places particular emphasis on the key elements of Lenin’s thought – the dictatorship of the proletariat, the nature of the dialectic and the New Economic Policy · Additional comprehensive coverage includes the theory of the party, Bolshevism, imperialism, and the class struggle in the countryside · Examines the relation of Lenin’s thought to the ideas of his most influential contemporaries as well as the most eminent thinker to interpret Lenin since his death – György Lukács This Handbook is essential reading for scholars, researchers and advanced students in political philosophy, political theory, the history of political ideas, economics, international relations and world history. It is also ideal for the general reader who wishes to understand some of the most powerful ideas that have shaped the modern world and that may yet shake the world again.

Two centuries after his birth, Karl Marx is read almost solely through the lens of Marxism, his works examined for how they fit into the doctrine that was developed from them after his death. With Marx’s Dream, Tom Rockmore offers a much-needed alternative view, distinguishing rigorously between Marx and Marxism. Rockmore breaks with the Marxist view of Marx in three key ways. First, he shows that the concern with the relation of theory to practice—reflected in Marx’s famous claim that philosophers only interpret the world, while the point is to change it—arose as early as Socrates, and has been central to philosophy in its best moments. Second, he seeks to free Marx from his unsolicited Marxist embrace in order to consider his theory on its own merits. And, crucially, Rockmore relies on the normal standards of philosophical debate, without the special pleading to which Marxist accounts too often resort. Marx’s failures as a thinker, Rockmore shows, lie less in his diagnosis of industrial capitalism’s problems than in the suggested remedies, which are often unsound. ​ Only a philosopher of Rockmore’s stature could tackle a project this substantial, and the results are remarkable: a fresh Marx, unencumbered by doctrine and full of insights that remain salient today.

German Idealism as Constructivism is the culmination of many years of research by distinguished philosopher Tom Rockmore—it is his definitive statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of constructivism that still plagues our grasp of the history of German idealism and the whole epistemological project today. Rockmore argues that German idealism—which includes iconic thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—can best be understood as a constructivist project, one that asserts that we cannot know the mind-independent world as it is but only our own mental construction of it. Since ancient Greece philosophers have tried to know the world in itself, an effort that Kant believed had failed. His alternative strategy—which came to be known as the Copernican revolution—was that the world as we experience and know it depends on the mind. Rockmore shows that this project was central to Kant’s critical philosophy and the later German idealists who would follow him. He traces the different ways philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel formulated their own versions of constructivism. Offering a sweeping but deeply attuned analysis of a crucial part of the legacy of German idealism, Rockmore reinvigorates this school of philosophy and opens up promising new avenues for its study.

“Materialism,” which is central for Marxism, is apparently less important for Marx, who, after the “Theses on Feuerbach,” only rarely mentions it. In Capital, Marx mentions “materialism” only two times: in a passage on Giambattista Vico, an important eighteenth Italian philosopher, and in the Afterword to the second German edition in the famous comment on Hegelian dialectic. This paper concerns the reference to Vico. This reference is important in two ways: in calling attention to a basic similarity between Marx’s position and Vico’s constructivist approach to knowledge, and in suggesting Marx’s position is not science but rather a particular kind of philosophy.

This excellent study of the theme of polemos shows a detailed grasp of the entire range of Heidegger’s writings and relevant parts of the huge and rapidly growing secondary literature. This work is based on recent efforts to understand the link between Heidegger’s philosophical theories and his politics. In Fried’s opinion, efforts by Heidegger or his more uncritical fans to deny his Nazi proclivities are not only fallacious but also obscure his theories. Fried is concerned to grasp Heidegger’s theories within his times and as they relate to our times without reducing one to the other. In following polemos throughout Heidegger’s writings, he casts genuine light on the position as a whole. Fried focuses mainly on the middle period, when Heidegger is explicitly concerned with polemos. He shows that this concept links together Heidegger’s writings, early and late.