Marx and Kant: Key Concepts and Theories
Marx’s Philosophy
History of Marxism
- Left Hegelian
- Feuerbach – Defends materialism
- Utopian Socialism – Thinkers like Fourier, Owen, and others demanded social reforms that ended the exploitation of workers.
- Economists – British economic liberalism (e.g., A. Smith) considered the law of supply and demand as natural, justifying the capitalist system (Invisible Hand).
- Rousseau considered the natural equality of men, attributing the inequalities to social institutions.
Dialectical Materialism
Marx argues that
Read MorePhilosophical and Scientific Methods: Reality and Knowledge
Empiricism and the Evolution of Scientific Thought
From the standpoint of method, figures like Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Kant, Comte, and John Stuart Mill are generic. In the field of empiricism, we can emphasize Mach, Duhem, the Vienna Circle, and Quine. The Vienna Circle advocated for verification, proposing that all scientific experiments be proven by an empirical method to make them true. K. Popper challenged this with falsificationism, arguing that it is not possible to verify all hypotheses.
Read MorePersonal Identity, Freedom, and Responsibility in Ethics
Personal Identity, Freedom, and Responsibility
Human beings, as moral subjects, become themselves with their ethical and moral choices. These choices can lead to a happy and fulfilled life or a bitter and frustrated one. The good that all persons want to achieve in their moral life is, as Aristotle and St. Thomas believed, to achieve the best for their life. The morally wise and good person always tries to do good, not bowing to good or bad fortune, to ensure their emotional and psychological inner
Read MoreHume’s Philosophy: Enlightenment, Empiricism, and Ethics
Hume: Historical Context and Core Ideas
Hume sought a scientific view of man and the world, proclaiming confidence in progress with the intention of extending his vision so that the world could be understood. Man is in a process of improvement, and reason should guide his life. Enlightenment liberalism can be categorized as English (proclamation of the rights of individuals as natural and inalienable against state power, which no human society can prohibit) and Deism (proclamation of faith in a creator
Read MoreNietzsche’s Philosophy: Apollonian vs. Dionysian, Knowledge, and Nihilism
The Apollonian and Dionysian
Nietzsche believed that the forces originating in Greek culture had been two aesthetic forces that fight each other but cannot exist without the other: the Apollonian, which represents order, light, as the limit, the principle of individuation, and its opposite, the Dionysian, which is the symbol of the deep flow of the vita itself, which breaks all barriers and ignores all the constraints, which reflects the primary unity above all the principle of individuation. With
Read MoreKant’s Philosophy: A Copernican Revolution in Epistemology
Kant’s Copernican Revolution
Kant called his “Copernican revolution” a radical change which states in its conception of the process of knowledge.
Knowledge is a process between man (subject) and the world (objective reality or object), a process by which man captures and interprets the world, that is, perceives reality and explains it. We call the man who knows the “knower” and the reality that is known the “object known.”
Knowing is not that the subject grasps the object as it is, making it an image
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