Sep 12Is Reality Spiritual? The Forgotten May SinclairMay Sinclair (1863–1946) is remembered as a novelist, but not very much as a philosopher. She was, however, one of the most creative and eloquent defenders of British idealism against the attacks of early analytic philosophy. While there has been significant work recently recovering the contributions of women in early…Idealism4 min readIdealism4 min read
Published inGenus Specious·Feb 14Analytic Philosophy, Bourgeois IdeologyMy friend Christoph Schuringa touched a real nerve with his Jacobin piece on analytic philosophy. What I took from his piece is, roughly, that analytic philosophy is bourgeois ideology. That’s to say, it is a research programme that ultimately serves the interest of the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie. If that’s…8 min read8 min read
Nov 10, 2022Shadow SocialismSome socialists are “market” socialists, others are “planning” socialists. “Planning” usually means central planning, though not always. Robin Hahnel and others have for a while been advocating a system of democratic economic planning, though I think it would be fairest to say that this is somewhere in between a planning…6 min read6 min read
Nov 3, 2021Fascism wasn’t neededThe attack on the US Capitol Building gave new impetus to an ongoing media debate over whether Donald Trump (and others like him) should be called a fascist. There is a limit to how fruitful debates like this can be, of course. There is no simple rule on how we…Fascism6 min readFascism6 min read
Jun 19, 2021Discount Rates, Exploitation, and the End of CapitalismAlexander Douglas I don’t often have the opportunity to publicly engage in general speculation about our economic future. I hope you don’t mind my using this event as such an opportunity. Everything I say below is offered as a mere speculation, whose establishment would depend on a great deal of…Capitalism22 min readCapitalism22 min read
May 17, 2021More on Spinozist and Zhuangzist ImmortalityI wrote before about Hao Wang’s suggestion that Spinoza’s view on immortality — or what Spinoza calls “the eternity of the mind”:Spinoza9 min readSpinoza9 min read
Jan 12, 2021Justin Smith on René GirardJustin Smith wrote a fairly critical blog post on René Girard to which I feel moved to reply. A lot of it attacks Girard’s appeal in Silicon Valley, which I don’t know much about. But the post also criticises Girard’s theory itself. The conclusion states that “René Girard, in sum…Rene Girard9 min readRene Girard9 min read
Published inGenus Specious·Nov 29, 2020A Bit More on Marx and CohenIn the last post I questioned G.A. Cohen’s critique of the Labour Theory of Value, which comes in two parts: (1) the LTV involves a mistaken idea that labour creates value; (2) Marx’s theory of exploitation can be retained without the LTV. These have been taken as established by some…Marx5 min readMarx5 min read
Published inGenus Specious·Nov 27, 2020G.A. Cohen on Marx on ExploitationAs I was writing on Marx on value, a few analytic political philosophers recommended this essay to me: G.A. Cohen’s “The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation”. I puzzled over it for a while, but I think it must be wrong, at least on one central…Marx7 min readMarx7 min read
Published inGenus Specious·Nov 14, 2020Susan Stebbing on Metaphysics and BeautyIn 1932 L. Susan Stebbing gave a wonderful presentation to the Aristotelian Society, on ‘The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics’. In it, she begins with a number of accurate historical statements, for example that J.M.E. McTaggart was ‘the greatest deductive philosopher of this century (and […] the greatest since Spinoza)’…Philosophy5 min readPhilosophy5 min read
