Abstract

In recent year bourgeois scholars have given much attention to the analysis of various systems of knowledge as products of societal development which exercise vast influence upon all spheres of the life of society. This should cause no surprise. In our day, when it has become obvious that ideas are intimately connected with classes, that is, that the content of ideas is closely bound up with the needs, objectives, and interests of classes, an epistemology which ignores the societal aspect of knowledge can no longer win confidence. The concept of an "epistemological Robinson Crusoe" living on an uninhabited island of Truth reveals ever more explicitly its unfitness to explain the present facts concerning the development, transmission, and dissemination of ideas