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Case A: Steven Pinker’s new book on rationality attempts to make a cogito-esque argument for the absolute necessity of believing what ‘reason’ commands. Arguments “against reason”, he believes, end up defeating themselves:

When it comes to arguing against reason, as soon as you show up, you lose. Let’s say you argue that rationality is unnecessary. Is that statement rational? If you concede it isn’t, then there’s no reason for me to believe it — you just said so yourself. But if you insist I must believe it because the statement is rationally compelling, you’ve conceded that rationality is the measure by which we should accept beliefs, in which case that particular one must be false.

Continue reading “Pinker and Van Norden on Irrationalism and Relativism” →

The Uluru Statement and History

I’ve just finished Henry Reynolds’ book: Truth-Telling. The book is a response by one of Australia’s greatest historians to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The Uluru Statement is a declaration of sovereignty by a constitutional convention, convened in 2017 by a broad coalition of First Nations groups – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples “from all points of the southern sky”. They declare native ownership and sovereignty over the land of the Australian continent, which “has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown”.

Continue reading “History Wars and Culture Wars: Some Thoughts on Henry Reynolds” →

I’ll try to keep this updated as an index of posts I’ve written on the Labour Theory of Value in Marx and other thinkers. My thinking evolves over these posts, as I learn more.

Marx on Value

Marx, Value, Surplus Value

Marx on Value: Part 3

G.A. Cohen on Marx on Exploitation

A Bit More on Marx on Cohen

This one is a bit longer and more speculative:

Discount Rates, Exploitation and the End of Capitalism

I love academic Twitter! After sharing my last post on Spinoza and the Zhuangzi, I received responses from much more learned people, speculating on the possible historical connections.

So far I have only been using the Zhuangzi, and Daoism more generally, as a tool for understanding Spinoza’s philosophy. Edwin Curley once wrote that he read Spinoza through lenses ground by Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein, just as Harold Joachim had read Spinoza through lenses ground by Hegel and Bradley. I guess I’m proposing to read Spinoza through lenses ground by Zhuangzi, although it’s hard to imagine Zhuangzi grinding lenses.

Continue reading “A Follow-up on Spinoza and the Zhuangzi (with help from friends)” →

I wrote before about Hao Wang’s suggestion that Spinoza’s view on immortality – or what Spinoza calls “the eternity of the mind”:

has some affinity with the views of Taoism, especially those of Zhuang Zi, who would have endorsed the thought expressed by Spinoza in the next to the last paragraph of Ethics: “Whereas the wise man is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit, but, being conscious of himself, and of God [Nature], and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit”.

A Logical Journey, 109

Continue reading “More on Spinozist and Zhuangzist Immortality” →