NATURE, HISTORY AND THE DIALECTIC OF NEGATIVITY:

THE CATEGORY OF NATURE IN MARX’S WRITINGS

CHRIS DUARTE ARAUJO

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TOTHE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTSFOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIALAND POLITICALTHOUGHTYORK UNIVERSITY

TORONTO, ONTARIO

MAY 2017

MARXISM AND THE ABORIGINAL QUESTION:THE TRAGEDY OF PROGRESS

 David Bedford Department of Political Science University of New Brunswick P.O. Box 4400 Fredericton, New Brunswick Canada, E3B 5A3 

Abstract/Résumé 

Aboriginal concerns are among the least studied areas of Marxist thought. Historically, Aboriginal people have ignored or rejected Marxist ideas. The author suggests that recent events in Canada have given Marxists an opportunity to begin building a practical relationship with Aboriginal people. The left, he notes, must treat Aboriginal demands for cultural survival seriously. 

ADORNO ON NIHILISM AND MODERN

SCIENCE, ANIMALS, AND JEWS

Babette Babich (Fordham University)

Adorno, no less than Heidegger or Nietzsche, had his own critical notions of truth/untruth. But Adorno’s readers are unsettled by the barest hint of anything that might be taken to be antiscience. To protest scientism, yes and to be sure, but to protest “scientific thought,” decidedly not, and the distinction is to be maintained even if Adorno himself challenged it. For Adorno, so-called “scientistic” tendencies are the very “conditions of society and of scientific thought.” And again, Adorno’s readers tend to refuse criticism of this kind. Scientific rationality cannot itself be problematic and E. B. Ashton, Adorno’s translator in the mid-1960s, sought to underscore this with the word “scientivistic.” Rather than science, it is scientism that is to be avoided. So we ask: is Adorno speaking here of scientific rationality or scientistic rationality? How, in general, are we to read Adorno?