The Concept Of Nature In Marx

By Alfred Schmidt

In The Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt examines humanity’s relation to the natural world as understood by the great philosopher-economist Karl Marx, who wrote that human beings are ‘part of Nature yet able to stand over against it; and this partial separation from Nature is itself part of their nature’. In Marx, industry and science are the mediation between historical man and external nature, leading either to reconciliation or mutual annihilation. Schmidt explores this tension between man and nature in Marx and shows how his understanding of nature is reflected in the work of writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781682012

Alfred Schmidt

Dr. phil. Alfred Schmidt (b.1959, Linz, Austria) studied philosophy, psychology, and art history in Vienna, receiving his doctorate with a thesis on Edmund Husserl. He is a research assistant to the Director General at the Austrian National Library and has been working on Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy for many years, in particular on the part of his Nachlass held at the Austrian National Library. He is a regular guest and lecturer at the Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel, helping to create the 2016 Edition of the Tractatus Publication Materials on the online portal Wittgenstein Source (http://wittgensteinsource.org ), supervised by Alois Pichler. In 2018, he designed the Wittgenstein part of the exhibition Berg, Wittgenstein Zuckerkandl. Central Figures of Viennese Modernism at the Literature Museum of the Austrian National Library.