Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics

In this important new approach to his philosophy and politics, Cat Moir sets out to offer a fresh interpretation of Ernst Bloch’s work. The reception of Bloch’s work has seen him variously painted as a naive realist, a romantic nature philosopher, a totalitarian thinker, and an irrationalist whose obscure literary style stands in for a lack of systematic rigour. Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism challenges these conceptions of Bloch by reconstructing the ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions of his speculative materialism. Through a close, historically contextualised reading of Bloch’s major work of ontology, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance), Moir presents Bloch as one of the twentieth century’s most significant critical thinkers.