Philosophy at the Service of History: Marx and the need for critical philosophy today
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marx is famous for apparently dismissing the practical role of philosophy. Yet, as accumulating empirical knowledge of growing life-crises proves, the simply availability of facts is insufficient to motivate struggles for fundamental change. So too manifest social crisis. The economic crisis which began in 2008 has indeed motivated social struggles, but nothing on the order of the revolutionary struggles Marx expected. Rather than make Marx irrelevant, however, the absence of global struggles for truly radical change make his early engagement with the role of philosophy more important than ever. This engagement suggests a conception of philosophy as a uniquely practical discipline distinguished from empirical science by its unique capacity to synthesise values from the facts of life. The article examines the development of this conception of philosophy in Marx’s early work and concludes with the outlines for a new critical philosophy capable of generating a new set of universal values necessary to motivate anti-capitalist struggles today. Si Hegel a raison et que la philosophie émerge toujours dans un monde social dans lequel les contradictions se sont fossilisées, où le pouvoir d'unification semble avoir disparu, alors notre monde est un monde qui a besoin de la philosophie. L’automne 2008 a été témoin du début d'une crise économique qui promet d’être la pire de sa génération. La crise économique est liée à une crise politique de la démocratie sur le long terme (même si la crise n’est pas typiquement reconnue comme telle), caractérisée à travers le monde par un retrait de la régulation de l’activité économique par l’Etat et (sous le prétexte de la ‘guerre contre le terrorisme’) l’hyperrégulation des vies publiques et privées des citoyens. Les crises économiques et politiques sont toutes deux enserrées dans une profonde crise environnementale provoquée par la croissance hypertrophiée de l’économie capitaliste dirigée par l’argent-comme-valeur. Si cette valeur est en crise parce qu’elle ne peut plus ‘unifier’ le monde social (elle est maintenant la cause et non pas la solution des problèmes fondamentaux de la vie humaine) alors la philosophie, si Hegel a raison, devrait être conviée en tant qu'unique pratique intellectuelle capable de générer une nouvelle synthèse sur la base des nouvelles valeurs (ou au moins une nouvelle articulation des anciennes valeurs).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".