The aim of this analysis is to determine whether Marx’s diagnosis of alienated work applies to work that is performed in our time, and whether the concept itself is useful for philosophical anthropology. Marx assumes that there is a link between alienation of work and alienation of the worker. The author asks if these premises lead to further questions, such as: Is the phenomenon of alienation of work characterized unambiguously and precisely? Can it be useful for analyzing social phenomena occurring outside the proletariat? Is it relevant to apply this phenomenon to the philosophical discourse on man conducted independently of the historical perspective assumed by Marx? Will abolition of private ownership of means of production eliminate the phenomenon of alienated work? Which is more nearly true: Marx’s idea that private property is the result of alienated work, or the opposite, that private property is its cause?
This article aims to reconstruct Max Scheler’s conception of three types of knowledge, outlined in his late work Philosophical Perspectives (1928). Scheler distinguished three kinds of knowledge: empirical, used to exercise control over nature, eidetic (essential) and metaphysical. I review the epistemological criteria that underlie this distinction, and its functionalistic assumptions. In the article’s polemic part I accuse Scheler of a) crypto-dualism in his theory of knowledge, which draws insufficient distinctions between metaphysical and eidetic knowledge; b) totally omitting the status of the humanities in his classification of knowledge types; c) consistently developing a philosophy of knowledge without resort to the research tools offered by the philosophy of science, which takes such analyses out of their social and historical context (i.e., how knowledge is created in today’s scientific communities).