Volume 28, Number 17 · November 5, 1981
The Missing Link
By Robert L. Heilbroner
Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology
by Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Humanities Press, 216 pp., $10.25 (paper)
Modern thought tends to divide things into two worlds—a world of the empirical, the concrete, the particular, and a world of the abstract, the logical, the universal. Here lies the basis for the famous distinction between synthetic and analytical knowledge, the first covered with the fingerprints and grime of the material world, the second glowing with the radiance of disembodied thought. How these two worlds connect, which world dominates the other, how one can understand the opposing view, are among the deepest and most persistent of philosophical questions, questions that moved Kant to the formulation of his 'synthetic apriori,' Hegel to the idea of a logos in which both thought and matter might find a common ground, and modern philosophy to the distinction between positive (testable) and metaphysical (nontestable) propositions.
Review, 2445 words
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