Abstract

The paper discusses the issue whether or not value may be seen as being in the world, thus opening the dialog between analytic tradition and authors like Marx and Heidegger, and reviving some important issues prominent in the work of John McDowell. It stresses the deep connections that exist between value and agency and a certain conception of the perceptible world which we inhabit as agents. It argues that it would be no bad thing for analytic philosophers, who are engaged with issues of naturalism, to allow themselves to be mobilized by broader terms that Weber and Marx deployed such as ‘disenchantment’ and ‘commodification’ and ‘alienation’ in order to undertand our unease with the narrow and “thin” variant of rationality, characteristic of science.