On October 17, 2020, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a virtual panel discussion with Andy Blunden (author and secretary of the Marxists Internet Archive), Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico), Henry Pickford (Duke University), and Jensen Suther (Platypus Affiliated Society, Yale University), to address the question, How does Hegel task the Left and Marxism today?

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In our article on Karl Korsch, we attempt a sort of balancing act. On the one hand, we aim to keep faith with Korsch’s recognition of the need to realize philosophy by abolishing it.

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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there have been two major attempts within the philosophical tradition to leave that tradition behind, with each reflecting a distinct understanding of philosophy itself.

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On July 3rd, 2013, at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany, Jensen Suther interviewed Axel Honneth, director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and author of numerous books and articles, on behalf of Platypus. Their conversation focused on the problem of “reification,” or the tendency for processes of transformation to appear as, and be treated as if they were, static objects of an immutable nature. Reification was the theme of several writings Honneth delivered as the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2005. These lectures are compiled in the book Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2012). What follows is an edited transcript of their discussion.

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