New Left Review I/125, January-February 1981

Dominique Lecourt

Biology and the Crisis of the Human Sciences

The starting point of all radical reflection upon epistemology must be the recognition that in matters of philosophy we are still living in the 1930s. [*] This text is based on a talk given before the Centre d’Histoire et de Epistémologie des théories scientifiques et des systémes philosophiques, Université de Picardie, 29 April 1980. When I say ‘we’, I naturally mean, first of all, ‘we’ philosophers. It is impossible to ignore the fact that the fundamental problematics that continue to govern our thinking were established more than half a century ago and in their essentials have scarcely experienced any modification since then. At that time, various schools concurrently established themselves on the ruins of neo-Kantianism: logical positivism, centering on the Vienna Circle, the philosophy which, despite its current crisis, is still paramount in the Anglo-Saxon world and even belatedly gaining a foothold in France; phenomenology with its two contrasting faces, the transcendental logic of Husserl and the ontology of Heidegger; the critical social theory of Hegelian-Marxist provenance, of which Luk£s was the first representative before the Frankfurt School became its bastion; and, finally, dialectical materialism in its Soviet form, the birth of which can be precisely dated in 1931. Despite the intricate lineages to be found in each of these schools, and despite the variations on their main themes introduced by this or that particular philosopher, the stability of the international philosophical landscape is striking—it is almost as if philosophy had suddenly been stopped in its tracks and petrified.

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