Coimbra and Karl Marx
Creators: name: Carvalho, Mário Santiago De
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020

description: Son of a successful lawyer in Trier who converted to Lutheranism (in the Catholic Rhineland), Karl Marx (Trier, 1818-London, 1883), enters in 1835, at Bonn University and in 1836, at Berlin University. In January 1839, Marx begins the doctoral dissertation that he will submit by post to the University of Jena in April 1841, with the title, <em>Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie</em> (<em>The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature</em>). This academic work was preceded by a sequence of exercises (<em>Hefte</em>) dealing with Stoic, Epicurean and Sceptic philosophies, dated 1839, entitled by the editors of the Marx-Engels Werke (= MEW), <em>Hefte zur epikureischen, stoischen und skeptischen Philosophie </em>(Marx 1968a). The subject of the “Erstes Heft”, meaning the first of the seven exercises, which gave to the young graduate student a substantial part of the philosophical material necessary to compose his doctoral dissertation, was the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius’s <em>Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers</em>. As it is known, in this book Laertius deals extensively with Epicurean philosophy and quotes the latter’s letter to Herodotus: “In the first place, Herodotus, you must understand what it is that words denote, in order that by reference to this we may be in a position to test opinions, inquiries, or problems…” At this point precisely, the student Marx underlines the importance of Aristotle’s reflections about the place language must have in philosophical activity or in considering general things which are obscure “for the primary signification of every term employed must be clearly seen…” (again, a quotation from Epicurus). Epicurus’s letter goes on to the following difficult philosophical matters, mainly regarding the philosophy of nature and cognition: “… nothing comes into being out of what is non-existent. For in that case, anything would have arisen out of anything, standing as it would in no need of its proper germs. And if that which disappears had been destroyed and become non-existent, everything would have perished, that into which the things were dissolved being non-existent. Moreover, the sum total of things was always such as it is now, and such it will ever remain. For there is nothing into which it can change. For outside the sum of things, there is nothing which could enter into it and bring about the change. (…) [T]he whole of being consists of bodies and space. For the existence of bodies is everywhere attested by sense itself, and it is upon sensation that reason must rely when it attempts to infer the unknown from the known. And if there were no space (which we call also void and place and intangible nature), bodies would have nothing in which to be and through which to move, as they are plainly seen to move. Beyond bodies and space there is nothing which by mental apprehension or on its analogy we can conceive to exist. When we speak of bodies and space, both are regarded as wholes or separate things, not as the properties or accidents of separate things.” Dealing with this section of the letter to Herodotus by Epicurus, Karl Marx felt himself obliged to refer to three Aristotle’s texts (henceforth A., B, C) related to those issues. We know that two volumes of the <em>Coimbra Jesuit Commentary</em> were at that point on Marx’s working table, for he gives the three following quotations (according to MEW edition Bd. 40: