Fall 2018 Seminar: Marx, Marxism and Philosophy Today with Michael Pelias

Left to right: Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács

(2:15–4:15pm): a ten week course — $15 per ses­sion or $125 for all ten ses­sions.

Marx’s rela­tion­ship to Phi­los­o­phy from the Greek atom­ists through Aris­to­tle to Hegel has been com­ment­ed upon by many in the Marx­ist tra­di­tion. Through a gen­er­al, yet rig­or­ous sur­vey, this class will exam­ine Marx’s use of philo­soph­i­cal mate­ri­al­ism in his ear­ly man­u­scripts as well as a crit­i­cal and ana­lyt­i­cal approach to the schools of Marx­ist phi­los­o­phy that devel­oped with and after the work of Lukacs, Gram­sci, Korsch, and the Frank­furt school through the French exis­ten­tial­ists and struc­tural­ists to the Ital­ian schools from Del­la Volpe to Negri.

Week­ly Sem­i­nar Sum­maries:

Week 1: Sem­i­nar Out­line

Week 2: Sec­ond Week Sum­ma­ry

Read­ings:

1^st and 2^nd weeks: Gram­sci, Anto­nio. “The Study of Phi­los­o­phy” in Prison Note­books, pp. 323–377 (Inter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers edi­tion, 2005)

3^rd and 4^th weeks: Marx, Karl. The Eco­nom­ic and Philo­soph­i­cal Ms. of 1844, edit­ed and intro­duced by Dirk J. Stru­ik (Inter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers, 1997)

5^th week. Lukacs, Georg. “The Phe­nom­e­non of Reifi­ca­tion” in His­to­ry and Class Con­scious­ness , pp. 83–110. (MIT Press, 1970).

6^th week: Korsch, Karl. Marx­ism and Phi­los­o­phy

Adorno, Theodor. “Why Still Phi­los­o­phy” in Crit­i­cal Mod­els, pp. 5–18. (Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2005)

7^th week: The Ital­ian Schools: Del­la Volpe, Gal­vano. “Ital­ian Hegelian­ism: Croce and Galileo” pp. 229–246 in Log­ic as a Pos­i­tive Sci­ence (NLB, 1980)

Col­let­ti, Lucio. “Hegel and the ‘Dialec­tic of Mat­ter’ “ in Marx­ism and Hegel, pp.7–27. (Ver­so, 1979)

8^th week: Sartre, Jean- Paul “Search for a Method”, the intro­duc­tion to Cri­tique of Dialec­ti­cal Rea­son and Lefeb­vre, Hen­ri. Chap­ters 1,4, and 5 in Meta Phi­los­o­phy ( Ver­so 2016)

9th week: Althuss­er, Louis. “The His­tor­i­cal Task of Marx­ist Phi­los­o­phy (1967) “ in The Human­ist Con­tro­ver­sy and Oth­er Writ­ings, pp. 155–220. ( Ver­so, 2009).

10^th week: Negri, Anto­nio. ‘Multitudo”,pp.225–261 in Time for Rev­o­lu­tion (Con­tin­u­um, 2003. 2004)

Click here to watch this sem­i­nar on our Youtube chan­nel!

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* It is also possible to pay per session in person.

Seminar Schedule and Details