fdrake

Maybe me using 'red' as a paradigm was wrong. The intention I had was to portray red as a facilitator of comparison rather than simply as entities sub...

This is a better way of reasoning with Venn diagrams. However, I think it requires familiarity with how to set them up, which hasn't been demonstrated...

In your first diagram, if all Americans curse, the entire circle of Americans should be inside of the entire circle of cursing people. This is like th...

There really is a lot going on in §58 huh.

There were a couple of things I wanted to add, I'll also take that response from Street as an invitation to spell out explicitly the 'contradiction' r...

Flittering in and out of the discussion is likely to make me miss nuances and make inaccurate analogies, so please treat this post as an attempt to pa...

Spinoza has two notions which are similar to 'property', so when we're saying something 'has' extension you have to be careful whether that 'has' pred...

@"Sam26"@"Luke"@"John Doe"@"StreetlightX" I just want to thank you lot for the great discussion/exegesis. I hope you manage to keep it up.

Ego depletion doesn't really require the Freudian notion of the ego to get going. As a phenomenon, all it requires is that people exhibit less self co...

Ego depletion, useful idea.

Fine with me!

That's my plan too.

I finished what I wanted to do in my thread. I'm available for leading Riemann in a week or so, as I've other more important/work related commitments ...

Marx concludes this line of thought on the development of humanity: saying that a society which does not have all the above socio-economic-political g...

Marx takes a tangent next, relating religious belief to capitalism. Specifically, he diagnoses that religions which have a structural symmetry with th...

I don't think the answers are necessary. You actually get a lot more writing out proofs and checking them for errors systematically yourself. Unless y...

Marx moves on to considering a freely associating group of producers whose production aims to satisfy collective need, and their share of the distribu...

Marx addresses the 'Robinson Crusoe Economy' here, which has been used as a thought experiment for assessing how value and labour relate. The overall ...

Are you just reading it passively or trying exercises?

Christmas is busier than I thought it would be. It's worthwhile to linger here for a bit to gather the various uses Marx is making out of commodity fe...

Considering we both agree when talking about the context of the discussion in the PI we should table the discussion for later I imagine. We could prob...

I'm surprised you've continued reading the section on fetishism if my explanations are that bad!

I read that post and agreed with it. I agree that it makes no sense for C1 comparisons. What I've been trying to show is that there are language games...

I see being unable to say that a meter stick is a meter long, nor that it's not a meter long, based upon a hypothetical situation that otherwise makes...

I don't imagine there's a way to think about angles without requiring thinking about relative positions (differences of positions) of (probably the sa...

That might be the crux of it. It's possible to understand angles as transformed ratios of lengths; but we could similarly understand lengths as transf...

Just in case this breaks your mind as much as it breaks mine in this context, angles are actually dimensionless quantities - even though we can subdiv...

Marx continues on this theme of the reflexivity of the market (more precisely the reflexivity of value relations) and attempts to tease out how this r...

I'm viewing my attempt to neuter the paradox from as beginning from noticing that it makes good sense to say that a meter is 1 meter long from a certa...

I think so Luke, hopefully all my extra words helped.

I'll try and make it mathematically precise. By a C1 comparison I meant specifically 'comparing something with the meter stick', so it is a length com...

There are two notes in the next paragraph, the first analyses the relationship of socially necessary labour time (SNLT) to commodity fetishism, the se...

I'm not attempting to interpret Wittgenstein here, nor will I make much effort in sticking closely to the text, I'm trying to give an account of why I...

Maybe errata, but that's exactly the same target length as the meter was before. The changing of meter standards over the years follows a pattern of i...

After thinking it through a bit, while it's true that if a definite description applies to something at one point it will apply forever, this does not...

I still have a few bits left before I conclude my Marx thread for now. Think it's 6 paragraphs. I should be able to finish that by next weekend at the...

Evans. I read Naming and Necessity in undergrad and haven't touched it since.

I still haven't read more than the introduction of that book. I'll take this as a gentle reminder to read more of it.

Perhaps this is unsatisfying, but it looks to me that the necessary and sufficient condition for my use of Bob to refer successfully is that 'Bob' is ...

This still seems quite strange to me. Whether the description is definite or not isn't vouchsafed solely by my use of words, it's a feature of whether...

Can you offer a definite description of Bob from that paragraph I wrote about him? I have to say though, it is surprising to me that one would be requ...

I do agree that this might undermine my response to Janus, though. In that post I did use that the definite description at the start and the definite ...

Well, let's actually have a description of Bob ageing, more importantly changing properties over time. Bob was an especially large baby, weighing 9 po...

I'm not certain that I follow. It seems to me that if I began the paragraph by naming the apple 'Bob' and substituting all instances of 'it' with Bob ...

(this will hence be called the paragraph) I'm unconvinced. The paragraph regarding the apple contains various phrases that reference the apple, whose ...

You need to embrace spontaneous composting.

Please forgive me if this has already been covered, but isn't insensitivity to change or counterfactual supposition precisely the behaviour we'd want ...

Marx continues, reading the fetishism of commodities further back towards the foundations of his analysis; the distinction between abstract and concre...

I'd be down for Riemann and Kant and would lead the discussion on Riemann if you'd have this ignorant schoolmaster's musings. I hope @"StreetlightX" f...

A general note on Marx's methodology first, after exhibiting the underlying structures of value, its relationship to labour, and the various forms in ...