Activist philosophers - your nominations please.

[nino_savatte]

tariq ali a philosopher ???? sartre?????

I've just noticed you've been banned and a good thing too.

 

[Udo Erasmus]

I don't think that I identified Tariq Ali as being a philosopher. But as to Sartre, I don't think their is any doubt.

 

[Udo Erasmus]

This is why I nominated Sartre and Marcuse: both have outstanding activist credentials that are reflected in their works.

Can Marcuse really be claimed as an activist philosopher?

As a young man he was part of the Spartacist movement and was part of a Soldiers and Workers Council/Soviet.

But surely, the works for which he is best known were written when he had become fairly innactive - only becoming re-engaged in politics around the upheavals of 1968.

With the rise of Stalin, the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, Marcuse became increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of change and it was then that he began to read Freud intensively - surely his philosophy is essentially an attempt to explain the failure of the workers to revolt and the rise of Nazism with pychoanalytic expanations.

 

[nino_savatte]

Can Marcuse really be claimed as an activist philosopher?

As a young man he was part of the Spartacist movement and was part of a Soldiers and Workers Council/Soviet.

But surely, the works for which he is best known were written when he had become fairly innactive - only becoming re-engaged in politics around the upheavals of 1968.

With the rise of Stalin, the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, Marcuse became increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of change and it was then that he began to read Freud intensively - surely his philosophy is essentially an attempt to explain the failure of the workers to revolt and the rise of Nazism with pychoanalytic expanations.

That may be the case but the fact tha the was once an activist is good enough for me. There aren't many other philosophers who can make that claim.