Maurice Cornforth

Who was Maurice Cornforth?

Maurice Campbell Cornforth was a British Marxist philosopher. When he began his career in philosophy in the early 1930s, he was a follower of Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing in the then current style of analytic philosophy. He later became a leading ideologist of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He vigorously opposed the aesthetic theories of fellow Marxist Christopher Caudwell.

In Defense of Philosophy attacks empiricist philosophies of many kinds, such as those of Rudolf Carnap and William James, on the "materialist" grounds that they divorce science and scientific investigation from the search for truer understanding of the really existing universe. In this book there is a combination of Marxism with deep insights into the interrelations of the various sciences and the philosophical conundrums produced by the empiricist attempt to reduce science to the collection and correlation of data. Both the insights are based on the theory of the primacy of physical work and tools in the development of specifically human traits such as language, abstract thought, and social organization, and the essential role of the external world in the increasingly complex development of forms of life.