June 16, 2018:
"Philosophy" is considerably transformed in this period. Where Reading Capital defined it as the theory of theoretical practice, Althusser now says it represents politics with the sciences and scientificity with the practices. Strictly speaking, philosophy has no object, in the way that sciences have objects; yet it has a privileged relationship with science through which it produces categories which are necessary for sciences to overcome their inevitable epistemological obstacles. "For example, was it not in Cartesianism that a new category of causality was worked out for Galilean physics, which had run up against Aristotelian cause as an ‘epistemological obstacle'?" One observable characteristic of philosophy is that it "lags" behind science in this way.