ABSTRACT
On the tomb of Karl Marx you will find the following inscription, taken
from one of his Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The Philosophers have only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change
it’. The first part of this statement reflects a commonplace idea about
philosophy – that it is primarily an abstract and self-referential enter-
prise, which has little to say about people’s lives and the social and
political circumstances in which they are lived. The second part
suggests that philosophy is at least somewhat the worse for this fact.
