Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Marx had no patience for the traditional projects of epistemology: the attempt to refute scepticism by establishing a foundation of certainty for human knowledge, and the search for philosophical criteria by which to adjudicate knowledge claims. He rejected the methodological solipsism ( see SOLIPSISM ) of the epistemologist's customary point of departure: the Cartesian picture of a disembodied mind, reflecting on its own self-awareness, and seeking grounds to believe that its ideas accurately represent an “external world”. For Marx, this approach unintelligibly supposes that the subject can attain a form of self-awareness prior to and independent of a relation to nature and society. Marx shared Hegel's contempt for the idea that the philosopher may occupy a privileged position, somehow outside our evolving conceptual scheme, from which to assess the relation our concepts bear to reality itself. At the centre of his alternative vision, Marx places the concept of activity or practice . He urges that we replace the abstract contemplating self of classical epistemology with a historically situated subject, engaged in an active relation to the natural and social environment, and intelligible only in light of that relation. Marx thus dismisses philosophical disputes over the possibility of knowledge as “purely scholastic ”. Whether objective truth may be attributed to human thought ... log in or subscribe to read full text