_Ontology of Production_ presents three essays by the influential Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, translated for the first time into English by William Haver. While previous translations of his writings have framed Nishida within Asian or Oriental philosophical traditions, Haver's introduction and approach to the texts rightly situate the work within Nishida's own commitment to Western philosophy. In particular, Haver focuses on Nishida's sustained and rigorous engagement with Marx's conception of production. Agreeing with Marx that ontology is production and (...) production is ontology, Nishida in these three essays—"Expressive Activity", "The Standpoint of Active Intuition", and "Human Being" —addresses sense and reason, language and thought, intuition and appropriation, ultimately arguing that in this concept of production, ideality and materiality are neither mutually exclusive nor oppositional but, rather, coimmanent. Nishida's forceful articulation of the radical nature of Marx's theory of production is, Haver contends, particularly timely in today's speculation-driven global economy. Nishida's reading of Marx, which points to the inseparability of immaterial intellectual labor and material manual labor, provokes a reconsideration of Marxism's utility for making sense of—and resisting—the logic of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

_Ontology of Production_ presents three essays by the influential Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, translated for the first time into English by William Haver. While previous translations of his writings have framed Nishida within Asian or Oriental philosophical traditions, Haver's introduction and approach to the texts rightly situate the work within Nishida's own commitment to Western philosophy. In particular, Haver focuses on Nishida's sustained and rigorous engagement with Marx's conception of production. Agreeing with Marx that ontology is production and (...) production is ontology, Nishida in these three essays—"Expressive Activity", "The Standpoint of Active Intuition", and "Human Being" —addresses sense and reason, language and thought, intuition and appropriation, ultimately arguing that in this concept of production, ideality and materiality are neither mutually exclusive nor oppositional but, rather, coimmanent. Nishida's forceful articulation of the radical nature of Marx's theory of production is, Haver contends, particularly timely in today's speculation-driven global economy. Nishida's reading of Marx, which points to the inseparability of immaterial intellectual labor and material manual labor, provokes a reconsideration of Marxism's utility for making sense of—and resisting—the logic of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

Praxis is the identifying signature of the most prevalent contemporary versions of the reception and interpretation of Marx and of the movements of thought inspired or provoked by him. This view seems to accord well with the early “Theses on Feuerbach” and is frequently mobilized in support of the further claim that the “mature” or “scientific” Marx, the Marx of Das Kapital, above all had left behind his former preoccupations with philosophy in anything like a traditional sense, in order to (...) pursue single-mindedly and whole-heartedly his critical diagnosis of bourgeois political economy, the opening wedge in his “practical” campaign to establish first socialism and then communism. In this essay, I want to call into question some of the central commitments of this consensus. In particular, I shall suggest that Marx’s understanding of praxis, of human activity and interaction, is pervasively shaped by his conception of poiesis, the production of hitherto non-existing objects and, therewith, the ongoing transformation of external Nature. Accordingly, appreciations of Marx’s supposedly revolutionary transfiguration of the relation between theoria and praxis need to be recast and reconstrued in light of his reduction of praxis to technical production. Poiesis is the cardinal, indeed the unique, category in the ontological vocabulary Marx adopted in his earliest works and never abandoned afterwards, even when he went on to treat ontological issues much more economically. This monochromatic vocabulary so colored Marx’s analysis of the nature and civic places of labor and human interrelations, that both tended to lose the variegated contours by which pre-modern, if not all pre-Marxist, thinkers recognized them. Marx’s elliptical, not to say sibylline, allusions to the condition and the telos of “socialized humanity” in the Grundrisse and in the final volume of Das Kapital prove so perplexing exactly because ‘labor’ itself has become paradoxical—does it figure with equal prominence in both the ‘realm of necessity’ and the ‘realm of freedom’?—while praxis, once it seems finally set free from the spell cast on it by the presumptive ultimacy of poiesis, appears to lose its bearings, its pre-modern orientation to a goal such as achieved and mutually-acknowledged human excellence. The claims and promises of praxis turn out to be deeply enigmatic. (shrink)

Starting out from the ontology of human work set out by Marx in Das Kapital, the paper seeks to analyse the relations between the artist and his actions and aims, the work of art he produces, and the audience for this work. The paper concludes with a discussion of the problem of creativity in the arts, drawing on ideas of Roman Ingarden and other phenomenologists.

My aim is to show how Žižek's political philosophy is informed and made possible by his reading of German Idealism, thus establishing an intrinsic relationship between Žižek's politics and ontology, by focusing on the problematic of “political imagination.” First, we will see to what degree Žižek's interpretation of the Schellingian logic of the Grund lays the foundation for his own appropriation of Marx's analysis of capital and this theorization of the sociopolitical deadlock we find ourselves in. Next, I will (...) show how his reading of Hegel's concept of tarrying with the negative allows him to establish the possibility of a way out of this deadlock while simultaneously giving him resources to rethink orthodox Hegelian-Marxist interpretations of the philosophy of history and the very nature of the communist struggle. In the last section, I will demonstrate how it is the Schellingian-inspired concept of ontological catastrophe, which is implicitly at work in the former as that which guarantees the always formally possible capacity for political imagination and thus the condition of the possibility of an authentically political act. (shrink)

Argument that Marx has a realist ontology and a correspondence theory of truth. His views are compared to both Hegel's and Kant's. This interpretation departs from more Hegelian, 'idealist' interpretations that often rely on misunderstanding some of the work of the early Marx. There is also a discussion and partial defence of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

The article discusses the issue of the relationship between ontology and theory of knowledge in the works of Samara philosophers of the late Soviet period. The purpose of the study is to identify the local specifics of Samara philosophical thought by revealing the system-forming significance of the problem of the conditional unity of being and thinking at the level of a distinctive separation between ontological premises and epistemological prospects of methodological reflection in scientific knowledge. The objectives of the article (...) are (1) to establish the characteristic features of the views of Samara philosophers on the general methodological significance of the problem of the relationship between ontology and the theory of knowledge, (2) to demonstrate the methodological relevance of their theoretical principles in the context of the philosophy of science, (3) to substantiate the applicability of the latter for the activity approach to the social interpretation of theoretical results. In the course of the study, the author uses the method of distinctions, formed in onto-epistemology by M.A. Lifshitz, methods of functional analysis, diachronic reconstruction and rationing of the worldview legitimation of a particular subject theoretical entity. Thus, the article reveals the local specificity of the Samara philosophy of the era of developed socialism. The author analyzes the program for optimizing scientific knowledge based on the Borisov–Dukhanin methodology, tied to the materialistic solution of the “main question of philosophy” (i.e., the issue of the relationship of the being and consciousness). The article pays attention to the theory of the style of scientific thinking, proposed by V.T. Salosin, to the methodological foundations and reception of the socio-philosophical theory of M.S. Kvetnoy. The author examines the productivity of the Samara precedent of the interaction of worldview and methodological aspects in philosophy. The article concludes that the specificity of the Samara philosophers’ solution of the problem of the unity of being and thinking on the basis of the Marxist understanding of the the main question of philosophy lies in the fact that it is considered as a methodological problem of achieving logical consistency to express the balance between ontological premises and epistemological perspectives. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure from Jullien’s primary claim in The Silent Transformations that ancient Greek ontology propels European thought into ‘the vertigo of the event,’ the article turns toward a European thinker whom Jullien does not mention in this context, namely Walter Benjamin, and asks whether his work, too, succumbs to this vertigo. The choice of Benjamin as a ‘test case’ is governed by two factors: while his work is widely associated with notions of the event, (...) there is little recognition of the degree to which he was engaged with the Daodejing (in translation) from the early 1910s to the late 1930s. Divided into four chronologically ordered sections, each of which is prefaced by a claim advanced in The Silent Transformations, the article shows how Benjamin’s concepts of transition, effective non-action (under the term ‘proletarian general strike’), mimesis, ‘the second technology,’ and Jetztzeit (‘now-time’) are all traversed by a mediated conception of the Dao. The primary question around this re-evaluation of his work, guided by the idea of ‘the silent transformations’ that Jullien adopts from Wang Fuzhi, is whether the theory of revolution Benjamin developed in the 1930s can be characterized as Daoist or, better yet, Marxist-Daoist. (shrink)

The bibliography of works discussing Russian Marxism is huge, making it very difficult to give an original interpretation of this phenomenon. To distinguish myself from the interpretative mainstream, I do not focus on persons and chronology, but rather investigate the question whether there was a specific logic in the unfolding of Russian Marxism which led to its consolidation into a specific doctrine, focusing on dialectical and historical materialism, during the Soviet period, and transformed it from a pluralistic philosophy into the (...) monolithic official ideology of the Russian Communist Party. I concentrate on some theoretical and epistemological problems discussed by Russian Marxists, such as whether dialectical materialism is a theory or a methodology, whether dialectics is a logical or ontological category, what the term “dialectical materialism” exactly means, and what the materialistic understanding of cognition and the core assumption of historical materialism are. Accordingly, my approach has a reconstructive character: I focus on some fundamental propositions of Soviet Marxism which are recorded in textbooks on philosophy and try to recover their philosophical genesis. Thus my scope is restricted to a selection of relevant discussion points, allowing me to keep the philosophical discussions separate from political controversies. (shrink)

This is a review-essay on William Haver’s recent translation of three essays by Nishida Kitarō in a volume entitledOntologies of Production. Nishida is one of the founders of the famous Kyoto School of philosophy and, while his philosophy is not really Marxist, Haver attempts to bring Nishida into dialogue with Marx in his Introduction and through his selection of essays to translate. I attempt to situate Haver’s translation in a brief discussion of a recent debate on how to write (...) modern Japanese intellectual history and, through this examination, I suggest a framework for analysing modern intellectual history drawing on the work of Harry Harootunian, Moishe Postone and Jacques Bidet. In short, this framework attempts to relate the production of ideas to the temporal dynamic associated with capital, the commodity-form and other related mediations that make up the modern global capitalist system. Then I turn to Haver’s Introduction and translations and both explain some of the key concepts of Nishida and show how, using the framework that I outlined, Nishida’s work can be conceived of as failing to understand its own conditions of possibility in the multiple mediations of capitalism. For this reason, Nishida’s work, like many other romantic critiques of capitalism, criticises the abstractions of modernity at an abstract level, failing to account for the mediations of capitalism such as class and the commodity. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the theoretical philosophy of Bukharin as developed in his book Filosofskie arabeski. I analyze three concepts—perception, being, and dialectics—and show that and how they deviate from the meaning that they commonly have among other Russian Marxists. In this work, Bukharin drafts a theory that can be interpreted as a “relational ontology,” since it focuses on the relations between entities and since these relations are considered to be more fundamental than the entities themselves and provide (...) epistemic access to reality. My examination of Bukharin’s theoretical views shows that he continues Lenin’s tradition of materialist and dialectical thought. That is why, in spite of his innovative approach to some key problems of theoretical philosophy, Bukharin did not go far enough in his studies. His theoretical position appears to be an integral part of his political engagement. (shrink)

Georg Lukács was one of the most important intellectuals and philosophers of the 20th century. His last great work was an systematic social ontology that was an attempt to ground an ethical and critical form of Marxism. This work has only now begun to attract the interest of critical theorists and philosophers intent on reconstructing a critical theory of society as well as a more sophisticated framework for Marxian philosophy. This collection of essays explores the concept of (...) critical social ontology as it was outlined by Georg Lukács and the ways that his ideas can help us construct a more grounded and socially relevant form of social critique. This work will of special interest to social, moral and political philosophers as well as those who study critical theory, social theory and Marxism. It is also of interest to those working within the area of social ontology. (shrink)

Social work is a contested tradition, torn between the demands of social governance and autonomy. Today, this struggle is reflected in the division between the dominant, neoliberal agenda of service provision and the resistance offered by various critical perspectives employed by disparate groups of practitioners serving diverse communities. Critical social work challenges oppressive conditions and discourses, in addition to addressing their consequences in individuals’ lives. However, very few recent critical theorists informing critical social work have advocated revolution. (...) A challenging exception can be found in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–97), whose explication of ontological underdetermination and creation evades the pitfalls of both structural determinism and post-structural relativism, enabling an understanding of society as the contested creation of collective imaginaries in action and a politics of radical transformation. On this basis, we argue that Castoriadis’s radical-democratic revisioning of revolutionary praxis can help in reimagining critical social work’s emancipatory potential. (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct the development and the complex character of Zilsel’s conception of scientific laws. This concept functions as a fil rouge for understanding Zilsel’s philosophy throughout different times (here, the focus is on his Viennese writings and how they pave the way to the more renown American ones) and across his many fields of work (from physics to politics). A good decade before Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was going to mark the outbreak of indeterminism in quantum physics, (...) Edgar Zilsel started to develop a complex logical-philosophical theory in which statistical and causal laws were given an indeterministic foundation (Zilsel 1916). However, in developing his thoughts on the emergence of regularities from disorder, Zilsel arrives at a profound ambiguity with respect to the ontological or the epistemic nature of laws and order in the world: Whether this order is to be conceived of as an empirical finding or as the product of reason – this would have to remain unclear. This tension between rationalism and empiricism, as well as a tension between a realist and an anti-realist conception of lawfulness, can be identified in both Zilsel’s Viennese and American writings: a tension which touches the core of the “application problem” that would keep haunting Zilsel until his premature death. (shrink)

Philosophers of music often appeal to intuition to defend ontological theories of musical works. This practice is worrisome as it is rather unclear just how widely shared are the intuitions that philosophers appeal to. In this paper, I will first offer a brief overview of the debate over the ontology of musical works. I will argue that this debate is driven by a conflict between two seemingly plausible intuitions—the repeatability intuition and the creatability intuition—both of which may be defended (...) on the grounds that they are reflective of our actual musical practices. The problem facing philosophers within this debate is that there is no clear way to determine which of the two conflicting intuitions is more reflective of our musical practices. Finally, I offer discussion of an experimental study that was designed to test participants' intuitions regarding the repeatability of musical works. The evidence presented there suggests that the participants broadly accept the repeatability of musical works, but in a much narrower way than philosophers would likely accept. (shrink)

During the winter of 1968–69, members of the so-called Budapest School formulated a scathing “review” of Georg Lukács’ late work, Ontology of Social Being. In the wake of the objections (but not in accordance with them), Lukács began to revise the text, but was unable to complete it: he died in June 1971. The disciples’ critique, published in English and German in 1976, played a major role in the reception history of Ontology—or rather in the fact that (...) the 1500-page “philosophical fiasco” still has no remarkable reception history. The main criticism of the disciples is that Lukács’ work mixes two incompatible ontologies and recalls the worst traditions of Soviet Marxism. In this paper, I will argue that the disciples’ “review” is misleading (nevertheless, the historical circumstances may provide a sufficient explanation for this) because there are no “two ontologies” in Lukács’ unfinished book. I will concentrate on the source of the misunderstanding, the Lukácsian thesis of the “post festum-rationality” of history, and in the light of this I will analyse how Lukács describes the open determination of individual and collective action in the process of the social reproduction of life. (shrink)

A bewildering array of accounts of the ontology of musical works is available. Philosophers have held that works of music are sets of performances, abstract, eternal sound-event types, initiated types, compositional action types, compositional action tokens, ideas in a composer’s mind and continuants that perdure. This paper maintains that questions in the ontology of music are, in Rudolf Carnap’s sense of the term, pseudo-problems. That is, there is no alethic basis for choosing between rival musical ontologies. While we (...) have no alethic basis for choosing any ontology of music, pragmatic reasons can be given for favoring certain ontologies of musical works over others. (shrink)

I analyze Deleuze’s concept of temporality in terms of its ontology and axiological (political and aesthetic) aspects. For Deleuze, the concept of temporality is non-monolithic, in the senses that it is modified throughout his works — the monographs, lectures, and those works that were co-authored with Félix Guattari — and that it is developed through reference to a dizzying array of concepts, thinkers, artistic works, and social phenomena. -/- I observe that Deleuze’s concept of temporality involves a complex (...) class='Hi'>ontology of difference, which I elaborate through reference to Deleuze’s analyses of Ancient Greek and Stoic conceptualizations of time. From Plato through to Chrysippus, temporality gradually comes to be identified as a form that comprehends the variation of particulars. Deleuze modifies the ancients’ concept of time to suggest that time obtains as a form of ceaseless ontological variation. Through reference to Deleuze’s reading of Gilbert Simondon, I further suggest that Deleuze tends to conceive of temporality as an ontogenetic force which participates in the complex process of individuation. -/- A standout feature of this dissertation involves an analysis of how Deleuze’s concept of temporality is modified in his works on cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, temporality comes to be characterized as something other than the measure of the movement of existents. In his detailed analyses of Bergson — in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Bergsonism — Deleuze suggests that time involves an actualization of aspects of a virtual past as contemporaneous with the lived present. While not an outright denial of the relation of temporal succession, Deleuze’s claim implies a diminishment of this relation’s significance in an adequate elaboration of the nature of temporality. -/- Further, I observe —through reference to Deleuze’s readings of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza — that (the explicitly temporal) change of societal forms of economic organization is non-reducible to that suggested by linear evolution. The claim is that putatively discrete modes of economic organization do not enjoy temporal displacement with respect to one another. This suggests that linear evolutionary models of societal development are inadequate. This further implies that temporality is non-reducible to the relation of temporal succession. In concrete terms, societal change is characterized as immanent temporal variation. -/- Taken together, these analyses yield the conclusion that Deleuze tends to conceive of the nature of temporality as involving the ongoing realization of multiple — non-identical, sometimes contrary — aspects of a stochastic process of creation that is expressed in ontogenetic circumstances, social evolution, literary works, and filmic works. (shrink)

Among the casualties of the rush to relativism is a central tenet of classical thought: that great works of literature are great in and of themselves and not because of the needs and values of their time. This “canon-based view,” supply taken for granted by Johnson, Arnold, Pope, and Eliot, has long since been shown the door by views ranging from Marxism to today’s cultural studies. These views hold that the great works become great because of the values and concerns (...) of their own times, and they remain effectual, if they do, because of the ways they speak to their times’ concerns. There are no transhistorical values and concerns, though of course there is a past to culture and its works continue their indirect .. (shrink)

Post-Marxism emerged in the 1970s and 80s as a way to retain certain insights from Marxism while disposing of its indefensible and destructive elements, especially the tendency to reduce all social change to the economic base. This book offers a new and critical reading of post-Marxism, arguing that whilst it convincinly deconstructs the prevalent economism in Marxism as the necessary logic of social reproduction, it nonetheless still retains an ontology of a closed capitalist economy, inhabited by a set of (...) necessary logics. Through a careful symptomatic reading of the works of influential post-Marxian thinkers, Ernesto Laclau and Étienne Balibar, the book argues that while post-Marxian positions have constructed a theory of social contingency, it has failed in different ways to dislodge the constitution of class and capitalist reproduction from essentialist narratives. (shrink)

An impressive variety of theories of ontology of musical works has been offered in the last fifty years. Recently, the ontologists have been paying more attention to methodological issues, in particular, the problem of determining criteria of a good theory. Although different methodological approaches involve different views on the importance and exact role of intuitiveness of a theory, most philosophers writing on the ontology of music agree that intuitiveness and compliance with musical practice play an important part when (...) judging theories. A multitude of diverse claims exist regarding folk intuitions and matters of musical practice in the literature on the ontology of musical works. In this review paper, a systematized collection of about one hundred empirical claims extracted from the theoretical literature is presented. All of the empirical claims are categorized thematically. The paper also includes a short discussion on the role of appeals to common intuitions in methodological literature, as well as some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the ontological status of virtue as an instance of love within the cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor. It shows that we may posit the real existence of a ‘virtue’ in so far as we understand it to have its basis in, and to be an instance of love. Since God is love and the virtues are logoi, it becomes possible and beneficial to parallel the relationship between love and the virtues with Maximus’ exposition of the Logos (...) and the logoi. In particular, Cvetković ’s interpretation of the circle and radii analogy will be utilised (Cvetković, 2011 & 2013). It will be shown that when one practices a virtue, one is practicing and participating in love, and, by extension, partaking in God. Within the context of Maximus’ cosmology, this means that practicing virtue and love is the ultimate purpose of humanity in its journey to gather all creation to communion with God. This paper is primarily an exposition of primary sources from St Maximus, but discussion of the ontology of virtue is made with a view to bringing it into dialogue with modern theories of virtue ethics. This paper arises in part as a response to the August 2013 papers by Louth and Blowers on the need for increased scholarship on Maximus and virtue ethics. (shrink)

Some artworks—works of music, theatre, dance, and the like—are works for performance. Some works for performance are, I contend, unperformable. Some such works are unperformable by beings like us; others are unperformable given our laws of nature; still others are unperformable given considerations of basic logic. I offer examples of works for performance—focusing, in particular, on works of music—that would fit into each of these categories, and go on to defend the claim that such ‘works’ really are genuine works, musical (...) works and works for performance. I then argue that the very possibility of such works is ontologically significant. In particular, the possibility of these works raises serious problems for type-theoretic accounts of the ontology of music as well as certain mereological or constitution-based accounts. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the ontological status of virtue as an instance of love within the cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor. It shows that we may posit the real existence of a “virtue” in so far as we understand it to have its basis in, and to be an instance of love. Since God is love and the virtues are logoi, it becomes possible and beneficial to parallel the relationship between love and the virtues with Maximus’ exposition of the Logos (...) and the logoi. In particular, Vladimir Cvetković’s interpretation of the circle and radii analogy will be utilized. It will be shown that when one practices a virtue, one is practicing and participating in love, and, by extension, partaking in God. Within the context of Maximus’ cosmology, this means that practicing virtue and love is the ultimate purpose of humanity in its journey to gather all creation to communion with God. This paper is primarily an exposition of primary sources from St. Maximus, but discussion of the ontology of virtue is made with a view to bringing it into dialogue with modern theories of virtue ethics. This paper arises in part as a response to the August 2013 papers by Andrew Louth and Paul M. Blowers on the need for increased scholarship on Maximus and virtue ethics. (shrink)

*This article attempts a Marxist critique of Alain Badiou’s positions. The importance of Badiou’s ontology as an affirmation of the possibility of radical-historical novelty is stressed, but also its limits. These limits have to do with Badiou’s abandonment of a dialectical-relational conception of social reality, his refusal of any causal connection between social reality, political decision and event, and the absence of a theory of ideology and hegemony in his work. Consequently, Badiou’s notion of a ‘subtractive’ politics (...) cannot be considered an answer to the open questions of communist strategy, despite his endorsement of the ‘communist hypothesis’. (shrink)

Eco-Marxism presents a debate between two theoretical schools: metabolic rift theory, developed by John Foster and others, and world-ecology, proposed by Jason W. Moore. The debate refers ultimately to ontology, more precisely to the relation between society and nature. Critical realism plays a central role as the philosophical underlabouring for metabolic rift theory and has implications regarding the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debate as well. Reviewing the debate through CR categories provides clarity about the specifically social character of the causes of ecological (...) disruptions. Using CR, metabolic rift theorists could explain the interdisciplinary character of their analyses. By distinguishing between real transfactual mechanisms and their actual interaction in open systems, I intend to show that neither metabolic rift theory, nor its interdisciplinary approach to the Anthropocene, involve Cartesian Dualism, as Moore claims. World-Ecology provides an alternative historical account of capitalism's environmental history, but it does not critically replace metabolic rift theory. (shrink)

This essay examines the effects of a change from traditional to working ontology on some conceptual problems that are under discussion in the literature : the liar paradox, the announced surprise paradox, the measurement problem, and the uncertainty relation. Some aspects of these puzzles appear to be by-products of the use of traditional ontology - as it is implied, for instance, in naïve realism - where conceptual tools have a (mind-independent) life of their own. Considering (in working (...) class='Hi'>ontology) what people can actually do with the conceptual tools they have facilitates the access to these puzzles. (shrink)

The thesis that there is a reciprocal relationship between human beings and work—i.e., although man controls work, he may find in it either fulfillment or degradation—has its roots in the Marxist theory of alienation. This paper, therefore, tackles this problem from a Marxist perspective. It examines Marx and Engels’s analysis of the history and causes of human alienation by presenting their views on human nature and how work is related to the individual’s search for meaning (...) and fulfillment. The two—man and work—cannot be separated, for doing so leads to alienated work (production alienation) and alienated worker (self-alienation). Hence, the problem of employee satisfaction has to be dealt with from the perspective of how employees experience their relation to their work. (shrink)

[ES] Confronta ciertos enigmas surgidos en torno a la naturaleza e identidad de la obra musical, y rechaza estos enigmas por irreales: o bien ellos conciernen a la obra musical en sí misma, en cuyo caso son enigmas acerca del estatus metafísico de un objeto intencional, y por lo tanto susceptibles a una solución arbitraria, o bien ellos conciernen a los sonidos con los que la obra es escuchada, en cuyo caso simplemente se trata de casos especiales de los problemas (...) concernientes a la naturaleza e identidad de los eventos. [EN] Confronts certain puzzles raised about the nature and identity of the musical work, and dismisses these puzzles as unreal: either they concern the musical work itself, in which case they are puzzles about the metaphysical status of an intentional object, and therefore susceptible to an arbitrary solution, or they concern the sounds in which the work is heard, in which case they are simply special cases of the problems concerning the nature and identity of events. (shrink)

RESUMEN Como reacción a la recuperación académica de un Marx completamente desvinculado de la tradición marxista-leninista realizada a finales del siglo XX, las dos últimas décadas han presenciado un nuevo intento, propiamente filosófico, de rescatar partes del pensamiento de Lenin, si bien se han llevado a cabo desde posiciones epistemológicas, y con objetivos políticos, altamente divergentes. El presente artículo analiza y compara las que consideramos que son las dos líneas principales de esta recuperación: La liderada por Slavoj Žižek desde posiciones (...) sociosimbólicas post-althusserianas, y la desarrollada por Antonio Negri y Michael Hardt a partir de la ontología deleuzo-guattariana y el post-operaísmo. ABSTRACT Towards the end of the 2oth century there took place an academic recovery of a Marx completely detached from the Marxist-Leninist tradition. As a reaction, in the last two decades there has been a new properly philosophical attempt to rescue pieces of Lenin's thinking. This recovery has been carried out from epistemological positions and with clearly divergent political objectives. This article analyzes and compares what we consider to be the two main lines of this recovery: the one led by Slavoj Žižek from post-Althusserian socio-symbolic positions, and the one developed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt from Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology and post-operaism. (shrink)

The moot point of the Western philosophical rhetoric about free will consists in examining whether the claim of authorship to intentional, deliberative actions fits into or is undermined by a one-way causal framework of determinism. Philosophers who think that reconciliation between the two is possible are known as metaphysical compatibilists. However, there are philosophers populating the other end of the spectrum, known as the metaphysical libertarians, who maintain that claim to intentional agency cannot be sustained unless it is assumed that (...) indeterministic causal processes pervade the action-implementation apparatus employed by the agent. The metaphysical libertarians differ among themselves on the question of whether the indeterministic causal relation exists between the series of intentional states and processes, both conscious and unconscious, and the action, making claim for what has come to be known as the event-causal view, or between the agent and the action, arguing that a sort of agent causation is at work. In this paper, I have tried to propose that certain features of both event-causal and agent-causal libertarian views need to be combined in order to provide a more defendable compatibilist account accommodating deliberative actions with deterministic causation. The ‘‘agent-executed-eventcausal libertarianism’’, the account of agency I have tried to develop here, integrates certain plausible features of the two competing accounts of libertarianism turning them into a consistent whole. I hope to show in the process that the integration of these two variants of libertarianism does not challenge what some accounts of metaphysical compatibilism propose—that there exists a broader deterministic relation between the web of mental and extra-mental components constituting the agent’s dispositional system—the agent’s beliefs, desires, short-term and long-term goals based on them, the acquired social, cultural and religious beliefs, the general and immediate and situational environment in which the agent is placed, etc. on the one hand and the decisions she makes over her lifetime on the basis of these factors. While in the ‘‘Introduction’’ the philosophically assumed anomaly between deterministic causation and the intentional act of deciding has been briefly surveyed, the second section is devoted to the task of bridging the gap between compatibilism and libertarianism. The next section of the paper turns to an analysis of folk-psychological concepts and intuitions about the effects of neurochemical processes and prior mental events on the freedom of making choices. How philosophical insights can be beneficially informed by taking into consideration folk-psychological intuitions has also been discussed, thus setting up the background for such analysis. It has been suggested in the end that support for the proposed theory of intentional agency can be found in the folk-psychological intuitions, when they are taken in the right perspective. (shrink)

The investigation of the social and epistemological context of the rejection of ontology makes György Lukács’s critique of neopositivism an important moment of his late work, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins . This article argues, on the one hand, that Lukács’s critique of neopositivism can be regarded as an indispensable contribution to understand the social roots of realist attitudes towards ontology, and, on the other hand, that the target of Lukács’s marxist critique of neopositivism is indeed (...) a special, neutral epistemological position between realism and instrumentalism, which became explicit only in a later period of history of neopositivism. To prove this assumption, I investigate some components of Lukács’s critique of neopositivism-critique by showing inter alia that Lukács fails to distinguish clearly between the two different forms of realism—scientific and moderate—which lead to the rejection of ontology. (shrink)

This review article analyses the topic of phenomenological Marxism, examining its historical formulations, critical contributions, and contemporary re-enactments. It begins with an overview of the works of Enzo Paci and the Milan school of phenomenology, as well as Jan Patočka and Karel Kosík. In addition, it explores the recent work by Ian H. Angus, whose book, Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism (2021), presents an innovative perspective on the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism. Angus’s work emphasizes the intersection of Husserl (...) and Marx’s ontologies of the lifeworld and labour, offering a fresh perspective on the discourse surrounding the relationship between nature, labour, and culture. Drawing on both phenomenological and Marxist categories, Angus argues for the need for an ethics of responsibility in response to the ecological crisis currently facing humanity. Angus posits that an ethics of responsibility grounded in phenomenological Marxism offers a promising avenue for addressing this pressing global issue. (shrink)

The pre-1932 writings of Otto Kirchheimer are often described by researchers as the work of a young ‘left-Schmittian’, a radical Marxist who gave the anti-liberal critique and theoretical apparatus of his Doktorvater Carl Schmitt a new purpose for different ‘political ends’. The danger of this approach is that fundamental divisions between the societal conceptualizations of both theoreticians are ignored in lieu of apparent terminological similarity. Through the lens of economy, it is therefore the intent of this article to (...) continue in the tradition of Alfons Söllner and Frank Schale, pushing against this assumed affinity and highlighting Otto Kirchheimer’s unique defense of liberal democracy. (shrink)

A good portion of the work in the ontology of color focuses on color properties, trying to figure out how they are related to more straightforwardly physical properties. Another focus is realism: are ordinary material objects such as pumpkins really colored? A third emphasis is the nature of what is referred to by the terms ‘what it’s like’ or ‘phenomenal character’, as applied to color. In contrast, this essay is exclusively about select color tokens. I will be arguing (...) that whether or not ordinary objects such as pumpkins are colored, regardless of what the true theory of color properties is, and independently of any talk of phenomenal character or what-it’s-likeness, some afterimage experiences are very hard to fit into any plausible ontology, physicalist or not. (shrink)

This book offers the first English translation of the _Quodlibetal Questions _of William of Ockham —reflections on a variety of topics in logic, ontology, natural philosophy, philosophical psychology, moral theory, and theology by one of the preeminent thinkers of the Middle Ages. It is based on the recent critical edition of Ockham’s theological and philosophical works.

This paper takes as its point of departure Merleau-Ponty’s assertion: “everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy”. In pursuing his later work, Merleau-Ponty signalled the need for a reconfiguration of his philosophical vision, so it was no longer caught in Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness. This required a turn towards ontology through which he consolidated two key ideas: firstly, a pervasive interdependence articulated in his reversibility thesis and the ontology of (...) ‘flesh’; secondly, a radical contingency at the heart of existence. This paper interrogates the political implications of these ideas, and specifically regarding humanism and human progress. Relatedly, I address the question – how might recognitions of ontological interdependence and radical contingency support a flourishing democracy? Merleau-Ponty’s early political work concerned the issues of his day – Nazism, Marxism and the status of humanism – and did not engage extensively with these emerging onto-political concerns. Nonetheless, there are indicative reflections in the writings and interviews; the political implications of his ontological interrogations become more thematic in the later works. There is no rupture between the earlier and later works regarding his philosophical vision, although he later distanced himself from Marxism with revelations of the gulags under Stalin and the Korean War. The overarching claim of this paper – we need to rethink politics from the ground up beginning with ontology; ontology is political and the political is intrinsically ontologically informed. Getting the ontology ‘right’ is a matter of discovery and not theory choice. (shrink)

The thesis that there is a reciprocal relationship between human beings and work - i.e., although man controls work, he may find in it either fulfillment or degradation - has its roots in the Marxist theory of alienation. This paper therefore, tackles this problem from a Marxist perspective. It examines Marx and Engels's analysis of the history and causes of human alienation by presenting their views on human nature and how work is related to the (...) individual's search for meaning and fulfillment. The two-man and work - cannot be separated, for doing so leads to alienated work (production alienation) and alienated worker (self-alienation). Hence, the problem of employee satisfaction has to be dealt with from the perspective of how employees experience their relation to their work. (shrink)

With Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reinvigorated debates in political theory and radical philosophy about the cultivation of revolutionary subjectivity. Their theorization of Empire and multitude has also significantly affected the tenor of critical approaches to educational theory during the past two decades. In this article, we discuss Hardt and Negri’s contribution to what we call the biopolitical turn in educational theory, emphasizing the influence of autonomist Marxism on their work. Even more specifically, we discuss the impact of (...) the autonomist tradition on their formulation of the nature of the relationship between the multitude and Empire: that the multitude is the generative force of the social world, whereas Empire is merely an apparatus of capture. This autonomist approach reveals a set of questions regarding subjectivity, materialism, and social ontology, which we argue are ripe for engagement by educational theorists, and indicate the enduring relevance of Empire as a valuable text for educational theorists interested in matters of biopolitical production, collective opposition, and revolutionary subjectivity. (shrink)

Work is an integral part of modern society. However, the question of the normative conditions that distinguish just from unjust work has been under-investigated in political theory. This article, b...