MARX E L’EMBODIED COGNITION

Pietro Garofalo e Felice Cimatti

In this essay the attempt will be to read Marx’s historical materialism from the point of view of the Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (RECS). The contribution is divided into three main sections. In the first paragraph, the “entity realism” of Anthony Chemero is discussed. Using Gibson’s notion of affordance, Chemero’s attempt is to overcome the dualism between subject and object on one hand; on the other hand, to consider reality more as a net of relations rather than of “entities”. These assumptions are discussed taking into account Marx’s works. In the second paragraph, the attempt to put into contact the contemporary debate on materialism with Marx’s historical materialism is justified. In the third paragraph, the key role played by the body in the human knowledge process of reality and the relevance of labour as anthropological and gnoseological category in order to put into question the opposition between subject and object in Marx’s philosophy are underlined.