The UK Prime Minister may have the regal touch in northern England, but he’s been wrong-footed on the constitutional challenges posed by the Celtic Alliance of first ministers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, argues KENNY MacASKILL
In simple terms because it engages with the real world and its origins, interactions and change, not (or not merely) with abstractions.
The first chapter of Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (1912, and still used as an introduction to philosophy) titled Appearance and Reality asks whether the table that we sit at corresponds to what we experience with our senses. It concludes: “Doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all.”
The book’s final sentence reads: “Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.”
Class struggle is the motor of history but the direction and detail of change at any time and place is the outcome of many factors, suggests the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
Humans are part of the ‘animal kingdom’ – and of nature in general – but also distinct from it and labour (work) is part of what makes us unique, declared Engels. His insights 150 years ago into how our species came to be and how we differ from the rest of nature, are as important today as they were then, says the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
The selection, analysis and interpretation of historical ‘facts’ always takes place within a paradigm, a model of how the world works. That’s why history is always a battleground, declares the Marx Memorial Library


