Publications

Journal of Modern Philosophy. Vol. 6. 2024

Marx is a fallibilist. He holds that no commitment is immune to revision under pressure of rational scrutiny. His criticisms of rival thinkers often turn not just on their getting things wrong, but on their being too little observant of this precept. I examine one such episode: Marx’s critique of Stirner in The German Ideology. Stirner is himself a fallibilist and understands his philosophy as a correction against earlier, less successful attempts to pursue a consistently fallibilistic program in philosophy. Marx argues, however, that Stirner is himself inconsistent in his fallibilism. Stirner treats one concept in particular—his central concept—as indefeasible, ostensibly because it stands in a privileged relationship to non-conceptual reality. Marx understands Stirner’s inconsistency to result from his making covert recourse to a given element in knowledge. Marx holds that there is no given element in knowledge, and that confused appeals to the given serve to cover over assumptions and insulate commitments from scrutiny, all of which falls afoul of thoroughgoing fallibilism.

In Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism. pp. 88-96. 2020.

Many kinds of relativism have been attributed to Karl Marx. We discuss three broad areas of Marx’s thinking: his theories of history, science, and morality. Along the way, we show that Marx is committed to a version of philosophical naturalism that privileges the results of genuine science over alternative ways of understanding the world. This outlook presupposes the possibility of objective knowledge of the world. It follows that Marx is no relativist (at least in the senses we consider). Unlike many non-relativists, however, Marx pays close attention to the problems with which contemporary philosophers interested in relativism are most preoccupied: irresolvable moral disagreements between social groups, the evolution of institutions and practices over time, and the prominent, perhaps decisive role played by non-cognitive social factors in belief formation. We show how some later Marxists have mistaken this close attention for evidence that Marx himself is a relativist.

On contract with Brill. Forthcoming.

This volume will collect the most important papers of W. A. Suchting, the Australian philosopher of science and scholar of Marx and Hegel. Suchting is most famous for his involvement, along with Michael Devitt, David Armstrong, and David Stove, in the so-called “Sydney Philosophy Disturbances,” which quite literally split the Sydney University philosophy department in half. However, he was also an incisive critic of 20th-century theories of science, one of the first Anglophone interpreters of Louis Althusser, an original reader of Marx, and an important (if divisive) translator of Hegel. The volume will contain two editorial introductions: a biographical and historical introduction by William Lewis and a philosophical introduction by Lawrence Dallman.

University of Chicago. Department of Philosophy. 2021.

My dissertation is a study of Karl Marx’s reflections on philosophic method. I argue that Marx’s method undergoes a series of definite, well-reasoned changes during the period 1841-46, culminating in a subtle methodological naturalism concerned to explain rival theories away as illusions given rise to by objectively misleading appearances. Marx’s reasons for modifying his method are more sophisticated than has previously been recognized. I reconstruct two overlooked arguments, in Marx, against rival methods for philosophy, both of which charge their targets with enjoining a kind of excessive doxastic conservatism. I also reconstruct Marx’s early and mature methods, showing how they determine the fine-grained argumentative structure of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology, respectively.