You are talking about the scientific method which tends to rule out a lot of scientific inquiry. Simply put, much of the natural sciences learn things without the use of that model. There arises the issue of Popperian versus inclusory definitions of 'science.'

How can that possibly be? Thought in and of itself is useless; what are required are inputs. Then you experience the problem of distinguishing between inputs which can be seen as properly theoretical or not.

I don't understand - are you talking about theoretically objective versus subjective ideas, or parallel universes, or something else?

What specifically denotes evidence as experimental or not?

They both seem to want to understand basic rules of nature. They take different approaches, for sure, but I can't see any real distinction where the studies overlap - notably psychology.


When it comes to questions like this, I am very wary of believing how any guru characterized their own thought.



I totally disagree. It is telling that philosophy was more widely used in the studies of nature. I think if we break the term down to its root and historical meaning, the confusion becomes more distinct.

Philo Sophia is latin for "love of wisdom," which is roughly what philosoph seems to mean today. More accurately, "the study of nature with intent to discover wisdom" could be a rough definition here. Wisdom, of course, is the collision of multiple pieces of evidence or intelligence, creating a synthesis among them. All experiements I have seen involve faith in various pieces of evidence (or intelligence), for instance a microscoped cellular structure relies on our understanding of how lenses work, what the cell exists in and as, etc.. It becomes clear that all or nearly all pieces of science can be seen as a compounded group of ideas and evidence.

Well, I don't see how that is possible. Conceivably, one could say that economic organization requires the consent of the constituents, and therefore that capitalism exists with the equal input of all people. That totally ignores a slew of psychological evidence we have surroundign the social structures of capitalism, however.

In any case, I don't see how that relates. The issue is about analysis of nature, as exemplified by different currents, with exclusive terminology which has no clear border.

Dean:

Not so; science has to interface with material reality at some point (in experiment, etc).

I reject Popper's work anyway.

What do you mean by 'inputs'?

Do you not know of possible world semantics?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world

That will, of course, depend on the theorist in question.

That is the point at issue; philosophers might say they want to do this, but they soon renege on this, and begin to impose their a priori schemas on reality.

Maybe so, but in this case, I think Marx was right.

Well, of course, you are placing too much reliance on philosophers' own definition of themselves, something you said earlier that you were reluctant to do.

They might have propagandised their status this way, but they were all ruling-class hacks of one sort or another.

And I am not sure about your indiscrimate use of the word 'faith' in the above passage.

No problem, we just re-define 'consent', and any other word you care to throw into the pot.

I wasn't too sure what this related to, so I cannot comment on it.

Rosa, I foten find it difficult to respond to you because you seem to miss my points sometimes, and you are very thorough in keeping up with the debates. I will try to respond tomorrow.

What the original poster says is misleading:

Balibar only says that Marx wrote as an anti-philosopher, who aimed to "go beyond" philosophy and achieve a non-philosophy of social change. Marx failed to do this (necessarily - philosophy cannot be abolished without revolution), but his work nevertheless produced a rupture within philosophy - what Althusser called Marx's "epistemological break" - from which we can all benefit as philosophers

What you say is true in theory....but not in practice. In practice Marx just is not a philosopher for the reason that he does not try to produce works which are philosophically defensible. Rather he produces works which are politically efficacious. It is incidental to his work if it happens to generate a philosophical line of argument, whereas for the philosopher that is the point. This is what Balibarr misunderstandes and teh Bachelardian idea of an epistemological break is itself a philosophical concept which locates Althusser as a philosopher (indeed he was a Kantian), but not Marx. Marx simply stopped doing philosophy and instead articulated theory; the break is not methodological, it is politiical. Marx just took sides and ceased to locate his own works within a common rational framework shared with the intelligentsia in hoc to the dominant class.

What is a non philosophy of social change ? It exists only as a stance and not as a set of ideas, because as the latter it becomes a philosophy of social change. As a stance it is a matter of ignoring philosophers and all their involutions, except to the extent that they have political influence.

Gil:

Yet more dogmatism. How can you possibly know this: "It exists only as a stance and not as a set of ideas, because as the latter it becomes a philosophy of social change"?

In fact, your earlier comment was far more accurate: "Marx simply stopped doing philosophy and instead articulated theory; the break is not methodological, it is political."

As such, historical materialism is a scientific theory --, if shorn of dialectics, as Marx argued in Das Kapital.

It all depends on what is meant by "philosophy". We could run up 100 pages on this one question, but I would suggest the definition Balibar is using is far more extensive that other people might wish to admit.

One can say Marx was not a philosopher, but rather an economist, or a historian, or even a scientist - but then we have to ask whether these disciplines really are separate from philosophy at all. Those that tend to insist most on this (arbitrary) distinction are usually those bourgeois philosophers who will not admit (or wish to disguise) that bourgeois philosophy is already present in these disciplines.

For instance, if you pick up your average undergrad economics textbook you'll probably see the authors devoting some chapter to "descriptive versus normative economics", as if to imply a properly descriptive economics completely avoids normative considerations. This, as one can see, is positivism, which reduces analysis to "facts" and denies that human events are caused - the perfect disguise for capitalism. Similarly in the social sciences, those who insist history, sociology and pscycology are independent from philosophy are usually those most happy to see the colonization of these disciplines by those of positivist economics. This is also the poverty of ignoring philosophy in favour of political theory, since to really understand most political theory today you need to understand economics and have a background in maths, which - as I hope you can see - is not an innocent development of the discipline

To cut a long story short, philosophy - that which speaks to us about human existence - cannot end without the problems of human existence being abolished to the particular. In the 21st Century it seems unlikely that even the monumental achievement of Communism would achieve this. But, this is the condition. Marx told us that this was the condition. While we live under capitalism, and we are dominated by exchange, we must necessarily interact with and relate to each other in ways that are "alienated". We must necessarily live capitalist ideology as the real in order to live as human beings. Thus, it doesn't make sense to say that some persons go around living their everyday lives "without philosophy" or even that we can truly understand the world in-itself "without philosophy"

I almost agree with this (and think its very well put, btw); what I have a problem with is confining oneself to the options of either living without philosophy or with capitalist ideology. I think there are a range of positions on a scale and we existentially choose our location; Marx chose a location in a critical relationship to certain dominant ideologies, but the structure of his critque of those ideologies does not have fully common terms of reference with those ideologies.....and that is a critical point.

On the face of it, under a simplistic logic, what Marx does should not be possible. Without common terms of reference debate and critique should not be possible. But Marx creates a body of theory which, at one level, achieves critique while also being incommensuable with what is critiqued.

At the level of ideas, this is a replication of the fracturing of society into classes....neither a member of the dominant class nor an entirely alien entity from it.

Considering philosophy as the study of 'human existence' in that context, we can see how in Marx's work the particular must still supplant the human - in the sense that he serves the generality of the working class, which is itself something of a more particular reality than the human, and must be in a class divided society.

Hence he is not doing philosophy .... because not putatively studying the human condition .....and not doing anti-philosophy, because his purpose is not break anyone from the practice of philosophy but rather to illuminate the political practice of class militants.