Consciousness and Reality

The paper considers Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as an original work, aimed to interpret dialectics as a theory of knowledge. The paper explores the historical context of the book from a political, scientific, and epistemological point of view, and the different themes underlining the semiotic ideology of Empirio-Criticism. In this view, the criterion of truth which distinguishes dialectic materialism from other middle-class materialist approaches is provided by the transformative power of scientific theories. The dialectic theory of knowledge raises important research questions about the origin of both individual and social consciousness and its relationship with the image of reality. In this light, the book is philosophically still current today: the interpretation of knowledge as a dialectic process can explain the debate between realism and conventionalism in science without falling back on stereotypical metaphysical nor relativist philosophical positions.