Lawrence Dallman

MA, Philosophy, University of Chicago

BA, Philosophy, Montana State University

BA, English, Montana State University

Philosophical Methodology, Epistemology, General Philosophy of Science, 19th-Century German Philosophy (esp. Marx), and 20th-century American Philosophy (esp. Sellars)

Title: Marx's Naturalism: A Study in Philosophical Methodology

Committee: Brian Leiter (co-chair), Robert Richards (co-chair), Michael Forster, Matthias Haase

Summary: Karl Marx’s reputation for obscurity owes, at least in part, to the idea that his writings involve the application of some special philosophical method, different from that employed by ordinary philosophers. Serious readers of Marx tend to distance themselves from this idea, worrying that it reduces (somehow) to nonsense. In my dissertation, I reconstruct Marx's early reflections on method, and challenge this dismissive attitude, which I view as an over-correction against bad habits common among less serious defenders of Marx. Drawing on recent debates about philosophical method within the analytic tradition (concerning e.g. intuition, analysis, and conceptual engineering), I argue that, properly reconstructed, Marx's early criticisms of G. W. F. Hegel -- though they perhaps miss the mark as criticisms of Hegel's own views -- raise very real problems for certain optimistic non-naturalist approaches in philosophical methodology. I then argue that Marx's mid-career writings on "ideology" and "historical materialism" are concerned in part to develop a new, alternative method for philosophy: a naturalistic approach, on which philosophical progress is made when more adequate successor theories explain (causally) how their less adequate predecessors came to take on the (illusory) appearance of plausibility. Through my reconstruction of Marx, I derive the outlines of an independently defensible, non-moralistic, thoroughgoingly naturalistic alternative to existing options in the contemporary methodology debate.