Reading Seminar: Marxist Takes on Science
Saturday, 24 January 2026, 5 pm
Address: 51 Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu Street, Room H1, Cluj -Napoca
Following the reading seminars on Evald Ilyenkov and Aleksandr Bogdanov, the conveners of those seminars, Siyaves Azeri and Alex Cistelecan, will begin a new series with a first reading seminar on January 24, to be held at 51 Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu Street, Room H1, in Cluj-Napoca. The Reading Seminar: Marxist Takes on Science aims to provoke a discussion around the following questions:
„What distinguishes scientific knowledge-production from other forms of knowledge-production? How are scientific theories—often presented as products of individual cognition—rooted in material practices, social relations, and historically specific problem-situations? How do scientific concepts and explanations relate to real structures and mechanisms in the world? Is scientific knowledge trans-historical, or does it bear the imprint of particular social formations? How do changes in economic organization, labor processes, and technological practices shape the development of scientific knowledge?”
The first seminar will discuss Boris Hessen’s The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia. The discussion will be held in English.
Topics & reading material for the series:
Seminar 1 (24 January 2026) – Boris Hessen, „The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” in The Social and Economic Roots of Scientific Revolution, edited by Gideon Freudenthal & Peter McLaughlin (pp. 41-102).
Seminar 2 – Henryk Grossmann, ”The Social Foundations of the Mechanistic Philosophy and Manufacture” in The Social and Economic Roots of Scientific Revolution, edited by Gideon Freudenthal & Peter McLaughlin (pp. 103-156).
Seminar 3 – Peter Damerow, Abstraction and Representation: Essays on the Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Chapter 5: Mathematics Education and Society (pp. 111-148); Chapter 8: The First Representation of Numbers and the Development of the Number Concept (pp. 275-298).
Seminar 4 – Peter Damerow, Abstraction and Representation: Essays on the Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Chapter 10: Abstraction and Representation (pp. 371-382); Chapter 11: The Concept of Labor in Historical Materialism and the Theory of Socio-Historical Development (pp. 383-394); Chapter 12: Tools of Science (Coauthored by Wolfgang Lefèvre; pp. 395-404).
Wolfgang Lefèvre: „Science as Labor.” Perspectives of Science 13:2, (2005) (pp. 194-225).
Seminar 5 – Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science. Introduction; Chapter 1-2 (pp. 1-132).
Seminar 6 – Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science. Chapter 3-4 (pp. 133-254).
The seminars are organized by the Faculty of Theater and Film, UBB and tranzit. ro/Cluj, as part of the project "Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis" (PNRR-C9-I8-CF104/15.11.2022).
