Criticizing the misunderstanding and wrong explanation of Marx's philosophical system made by recent Chinese textbooks on Marxist philosophy, the author argues that Marx's philosophy has practical, economical-philosophical, and ontological dimensions and stresses on reconstructing Marx's philosophical system through synthesizing the above three dimensions. This paper intends to set up a new outline of Marx's philosophical system, in terms of the following four concepts-thing, value, time, and freedom.

The needs principle—that certain goods should be distributed according to need—has been central to much socialist and egalitarian thought. It is the principle which Marx famously takes to be that which is to govern the distribution of goods in the higher phase of communism. The principle is one that Marx himself took from the Blanquists. It had wider currency in the radical traditions of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century it remained central to the mutualist form of socialism defended (...) by Tawney and Titmuss. The principle underlay the development and justification of the modern welfare state—thus the National Health Service is still founded upon the idea that the distribution of medical resources should be determined by medical need, not by ability to pay. One source of the power of the needs principle lies in the fact that it appears to be both a principle of justice and a principle of community or social solidarity. As a principle of justice it is offered as a corrective to the particular forms of unequal distributions of goods that can result from market transactions, and as a principle of community or social solidarity as a corrective to the possessive individualism taken to be the corollary of a market order. (shrink)

It is possible to read Gramsci ? and through him, the tradition of historical materialism ? in such a way that we are enabled to realise a potentially transformative politics of solidarity in a world where capitalist relations are extending and deepening, but which is nonetheless plural. A Gramscian?inflected historical materialism enables an understanding of globalising capitalism, its relations of power and structures of governance, as the product of struggles ? at once material and ideological ? among concretely situated social (...) agents. When viewed in terms of a dialectical reading of Gramsci, these struggles may be seen as reassertions of situated knowledges and process?based understandings of social reality, antithetical to the abstract individualism residing in capitalism?s core, and embodying possibilities for critical engagement, dialogue, and transformative politics in an era of globalising capitalism. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

ABSTRACTThe Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of sport. In the book, Suits investigates two fundamental issues in general p...

This paper offers an account of the social foundations of a theory of democracy. It purports to show that a social ontology of democracy is the necessary counterpart of a political theory of democracy. It notably contends that decisions concerning basic social ontological assumptions are relevant not only for empirical research, but bear a significant impact also on normative theorizing. The paper then explains why interactionist rather than substantialist social ontologies provide the most promising starting point for building a social (...) ontology of democracy. It then introduces and examines the three notions of habits, patterns of interaction, and forms of social organization, conceived as the main pillars of an interactionist social ontology of democracy and briefly discusses some major implications of this approach for democratic theory. (shrink)

The paper seeks to show how Heidegger recasts the problem of reification in Being and Time, so as to address the methodological procedure of formal indication, outlined in his early writings, in order to carry out a deconstruction of ancient ontology. By revisiting Marx's and Lukács's critique of objectification in social relations, especially the former's critique of alienation, in light of Honneth's critical theory of recognition, it is shown how a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenology of sociality could be reconstructed out of the (...) semantic correlation between reification and formal indication. (shrink)

Although the focus of "Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights" is practical, Gould does not shy away from hard theoretical questions, such as the relentless debate over cultural relativism, and the relationship between terrorism and democracy.

“Marxists,” Eugene Kamenka has written, “have failed to develop an original or comparatively coherent view of ethics that can be ranked as a type of ethical theory finding its natural place beside utilitarian ethics, ethical intuitionism, existentialist ethics, or even Greek ethics.” This judgment, that Marxism has no theory of ethics or no coherent one or that if it does have a coherent theory that theory is just a version of some type of ethical theory that is independent of Marxism, (...) seems supported by various recent philosophical discussions of Marx or Marxism and morality. Thus, Marx himself has been taken to be everything from a moral skeptic or relativist to an ethical intuitionist to a utilitarian to a proponent of a quasi-Aristotelian morality based on a notion of the function of man. (shrink)