Name: Reading seminar: Marxist Takes on Science
Start: 2026-01-24T17:00:00+02:00
Location: Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu 51 Room H1

Reading seminar: Marxist Takes on Science

Rather than asking whether science is rational according to abstract methodological rules, this series of monthly reading seminars asks how science actually works as a social practice: how problems are constituted, how concepts emerge from material constraints, how explanatory success depends on access to real causal mechanisms, and how scientific knowledge both reflects and transforms the conditions of its production. The seminars situate scientific rationality within history, production, and practice, offering a non-positivist, non-relativist account of science grounded in material reality.
The idea is to examine science not as an abstract, autonomous, or purely intellectual activity, but as a historically situated form of social practice and material knowledge production. Departing from mainstream philosophies of science that focus primarily on logic, methodology, or individual theory choice, the seminars foreground science as a collective, socially organized process embedded in specific modes of production and relations of production.
Central questions include:
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?
To address these questions, the seminars develop a materialist and critical realist framework for understanding science. Key themes include the social organization of scientific labor, the historical conditions of theoretical innovation, the relation between ontology and epistemology, and the dynamics of scientific change understood as transformations in practices rather than mere theory replacement.
Readings focus on the socio-historical and materialist analyses of science developed by Boris Hessen, Henryk Grossmann, Peter Damerow, and Wolfgang Lefèvre, alongside Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, which provides a realist account of scientific knowledge compatible with its social and historical determination. Classical philosophical issues—such as realism, explanation, theory change, underdetermination, and rationality—are revisited and reinterpreted from this perspective, emphasizing science as a historically specific mode of knowledge-production rather than a timeless epistemic enterprise.
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).
Conveners: Siyaves Azeri & Alex Cistelecan.

Topics & reading material
Seminar 1 (16 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 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, 194-225 (2005).
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).