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| 5278 | Philosophy is no more than abstractions concerning observations of human historical development [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At best it is a summing up of general results, abstractions which arise from observation of the historical development of man. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as nonsense, based on a bogus Hegelian notion that history is following some sort of pattern, and that mental reality is fixed by physical conditions. The philosophy of mathematics, for one, won't fit into this definition. |