Volume 27, Issue 2, 2024
Andy Amato
Pages 319-347
https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev202555153
Reimagining Plausibility
In Defense of Marcuse¡¯s Philosophy of Science and Technology
This article offers a defense of Herbert Marcuse¡¯s philosophy of science and technology against pragmatic tendencies prevalent in Marcusean scholarship and critical theory today. These tendencies, exemplified in the work of Andrew Feenberg, himself a former student of Marcuse, commonly include the rejection of Marcuse¡¯s romanticism, utopianism, and metapsychology. I argue that these aspects of Marcuse¡¯s thought should be reevaluated and taken as essential to his overall project. This apologia for Marcuse¡¯s philosophy and vision of radical change is particularized in a sustained examination of the cognitive priority of imagination and the superior objectivity of marginalized experience as working together to provide plausible criteria for science and technology.