“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
-Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy-Preface.
April 9, 2008
April 2, 2008
Weekly Lesson (8)
“Truth may be ascertained by several methods, each of which however is no more than a form. Experience is the first of these methods. But the method is only a form: it has no intrinsic value of its own. For in experience everything depends upon the mind we bring to bear upon actuality. A great mind is great in its experience; and in the motley play of phenomena at once perceives the point of real significance.”
-Hegel’s Shorter Logic, §24n [my emphasis]
March 31, 2008
Philosophical Graphs
Here are some graphs that I find useful in visualising some philosophical points.
First are five graphs of bifurcation:
(more…)
March 26, 2008
Weekly Lesson (7)
“Applied mathematics is generally not an immanent science, precisely because it involves the application of pure mathematics to a given material and its determinations as derived from experience.”
-Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, §202 [my emphasis]
March 19, 2008
Weekly Lesson (6)
“From the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:
- The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
- The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
- The law of the negation of the negation.
All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought.”
-Engels’ Dialectics of Nature.
March 12, 2008
Weekly Lesson (5)
“Freedom is just thought itself; he who casts thought aside and speaks of freedom knows not what he is talking of. The unity of thought with itself is freedom, the free will. …It is only as having the power of thinking that the will is free.”
-Hegel’s History of Philosophy, French Philosophy.
March 5, 2008
Weekly Lesson (4)
“Greece…, a small country that developed late at the periphery of an ancient civilized world.”
“The great Athenian achievement was not the empire and its fleeting temporal authority (both rather modest achievements by the standards of the ancient Near East).”
-Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, by Gregory Crane [my emphasis].
February 29, 2008
A Linguistic Idyll III
A Sub-prime Lexicon
Money: debt.
Wealth: debt.
Credit: debt.
Treasury Bill: debt.
Bond: debt.
Asset: debt.
Leverage: debt.
Commercial Paper: debt.
Investment: debt.
Bull market: market with debt.
Bear market: market without debt.
Inflation: too much debt.
Deflation: too little debt.
Federal Reserve: official debt printing machine.
Cash injection: debt injection.
Liquidity: availability of debt.
Illiquidity: shortage of debt.
Home ownership: lifelong debt.
Mortgage: debt you cannot afford.
Housing bubble: debt bubble
Ownership society: debt society.
Market index: debt index
Hedge fund: gambling-with-debt fund.
Private Equity: short-term profit long-term debt.
Leverage buy out: buying with debt.
Interest rate: price of debt.
GDP rate increase: increase in debt.
Economists: debt-mongers.
Banks: debt-pushers.
Growth: more debt.
Recession: no more debt.
Depression: debt is due.
Economic Crash: debt is repaid.
February 27, 2008
Weekly Lesson (3)
“No community embarks on a great enterprise without fortifying itself with the belief that from some points of view its motives are lofty and disinterested…Fanaticism is not a cause of war. It is the means which helps savage peoples to fight. It is the spirit which enables them to combine—the great common object before which all personal or tribal disputes become insignificant.”
–Winston S. Churchill, The River War, chapter 1.
February 22, 2008
A Linguistic Idyll II
Speaking ‘Literally’
“People got killed last week, literally killed”
- A financial analyst, August 2007.
At first look it seems that the word ‘literally’ was misused in this sentence, but further consideration will show that it was used correctly and that the resulting confusion is due to a fundamental weakness in the English language.
To get ‘killed’ in the financial sphere is to loose all financial stake and cease to be an active actor, mirroring the finality of death in the biological sphere. This figurative use is then extended by exaggeration to all large loses. So the word ‘literally’ refers to the literal sense in the financial sphere and not the literal sense of the word itself.
Despite the above example the word ‘literally’ is a word regularly misused, thus joining the majority words in the English language; to be more correct the language spoken in England, with roots in Saxon, Danish, German, Greek, Latin (medieval, late, etc.) and all Latin-based languages, this mangled core is then extended with words from all over the world (Arabic, Hindu, etc.).
To add to the confusion most words are not used in their original sense or in a modified sense, or are used in a figurative sense, or adopted from special usage (Maritime, etc.) or used (and misused) differently by different generations. The result of all this is that most people don’t say what they mean or actually mean what they say.
The least suitable language has become the world’s lingua franca; the confusion of life is reflected and multiplied in the language.
February 20, 2008
Weekly Lesson (2)
“We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.”
-Hegel’s Philosophy of History, §26
February 15, 2008
A Linguistic Idyll I
Badly Adverbed
“This war was very badly mismanaged”
- John McCain, 2007.
I know what it is to ‘badly manage’ an enterprise, it is to manage it in a wrong or deficient way and thus fail to achieve the desired outcome or achieve it outside the set parameters. I, also, know what it is to ‘mismanage’ an enterprise; it is to manage it in the wrong or not the best direction and either fail to achieve the desired result or achieve it outside the set parameters.
‘Badly mismanaged’ is a double negative, which used to be almost prohibited; to understand why we must look at the ‘actual sense’ of what is being said: If we understand ‘to mismanage’ as to manage in the wrong direction then to do it badly is to fail to take the wrong direction and thus in ‘actual sense’ take the right direction!
Because ‘mismanaged’ is negative we must use a positive adverb in qualifying it, for example we could say ‘brilliantly mismanaged’ or ‘amazingly mismanaged’. To further illustrate the point, a synonym of ‘mismanage’ is ‘manage badly’, thus the adverb ‘badly’ is already contained in the sense of the word and there is no need to add it to the sentence.
In the last decades the prohibition of a double negative has fallen to the way side and people seem unable to grasp the inter-relationship of words in a single sentence. So that when the sentence is negative all words, adverbs and adjectives must be negative; the conformity of life imposes itself on the language.
February 13, 2008
Weekly Lesson (1)
“Experimental physics will present the rational science of Nature - as history will present the science of human affairs and actions - in an external picture, which mirrors the philosophic notion.”
-Hegel’s Shorter Logic, §16 [my emphasis]
