ABSTRACT
The controversies over the dissertation are of course multiplied by the often obscure and vague manner of presentation of Karl Marx's text. This vagueness often gives the text an idealist flavor, especially when Marx asserts that his views are going to be presented as a history of philosophy. He is presenting the breakdown of the Hegelian system at the hands of the Young Hegelians by an analogy with the breakdown of Aristotelianism at the hands of Epicurus. Marx's thesis is a critique of Epicurus' failure to overcome the dialectical chasm between freedom and the reality of external nature. Motion, which for Democritus is blind necessity, for Epicurus can be explained as a form of freedom, that is, as the basis of self-determining matter. This idea of a self-determining nature is the basis of the "humanists" critique of Frederick Engels's dialectics. Humanist scholars are very much inclined to attribute the idea of eternal matter in motion to Engels's positivism.
