 So let me erase this from the whiteboard and summarize what we just did, if I may. So what I'm after here is Marx and the way he thinks his theory. Well, the first thing I talked about, Marx and the way he thinks about society, that his class theory of society was caused by the economic events. That had a shaping influence on Marx. But also, this last one I talked about, and also politics. He was a refugee. That shaped the way he understood society. But also culture. That is, I just told you, Marx studied the Greek philosophers. He studied British political economy, French socialists, and so much more. All those different ideas, the economics of Smith and Ricardo, the struggle of the ancient philosophers with the notions of causation, the socialists of the time, all shaped Marx's ideas. And of course, besides economics and political and cultural events, he was also shaped by nature. I mean, you can't leave that out. How much here he had, his height, his frame, his brain, also was a function of biology and chemistry, like the rest of us. These are different kinds of causations, different kinds of determinations. So political events helped to determine him, shape him, economic helped to shape him, and the result of all of this, if I keep on doing this, is of course Marx. So the dot exists as a site of causations, of determinations, emanating from, literally, everything in society, political, economic, culture, and of course, nature too. So we can say that Marx, in the way he thought, is, now I'm going to use the word, over-determined, by literally an infinity of different political, economic, and cultural events that are occurring. The word over-determination, the prefix on it over, is kind of a, this is what I'm guessing, is kind of a poetic way of getting across to individuals that the existence of anything, in this case, the man, and the way he thinks, or you and me, the existence of anything is complexly shaped by so much, and that over is a way of trying to capture the idea that there's so much outside of us that shapes us over-determined. So, first idea, I'm going to repeat this now. Over-determination means that any particular entity, no matter what it is, and I'm using the example here of the person and the way he thinks, the way he sees, his behavior, is complexly shaped by all these other events, all these other, I'm going to call them, processes, political, economic, cultural, and natural, step one, step two. The way a person thinks and the way a person acts also shapes everything that is shaping that person. So Marxian theory, Marx and his theory, complexly shape, you know, the economy, and politics, and culture, and nature, and it looks messy and it should be getting messy. What we're arguing here is that a person, and the way he thinks and the way he sees, is not only shaped by society, but also is a partial shaping of the society which is shaping that person. And that's getting closer to this notion of the dialectic, is that everything is both a cause and effect. Marx and his thinking is an effect of everything, but it's also a cause of that which is effecting, shaping Marx and his thinking. So nothing in the world, according to this theory, is only a cause or only effect. Everything is both cause and effect. And that's the lesson of this dialectic. Why this is going to be very important in terms of the next thing that we're going to talk about is that when we discuss epistemology, this theory of knowledge that I mentioned to you in the introductory lectures, there we're going to discuss the connection between two kinds of entities. The way a person thinks, and all the political, economic, cultural, and of course natural experiences that the person has. And in terms of what we just did, if we deploy this notion of over-determination, we're going to argue there that the way a person thinks complexly shapes his or her experiences and his or her experiences complexly shape the way a person thinks. Sounds logical. Rationalism and empiricism, the two great epistemologies, traditional epistemologies, I should say, have a very different notion of causation. Empiruses are going to claim that our experiences shape the way we think, but there's no feedback from thinking to our experiences. So in the last instance, experiences will be the foundation for truth. Rationalists are going to argue something very, very different from that. They're going to differ with the empiricists. They're going to argue that reason shapes our experiences. They're going to argue that reason is the foundation of truth. Notice something, that rationalism and empiricism come up with, albeit, two different standards of truth. Empiricism, experience, rationalism, reason or logic, but they have in common that they're both offering two ways to get truth, two ways to kind of validate what is true and what is not true. Marx is presenting a critique of them and an alternative which is saying there's no way to do that. Why? Because the two standards that have been presented, experience on one part, their empiricism, rationalism on the other part, I'm sorry, reason by the rationalists on the other hand, they're not standards. They're not because they're not independent of one another. That is, thought and experience complexly shape one another, over-determine one another, which is consistent with this kind of logic. So on the next lecture, we're going to begin to present that idea and why it's an important idea.