Intro to Marxist Economics Book Reviews

Review of Ernest Mandel - Introduction to Marxist Economics Ernest Mandel was a Marxist politician and theorist throughout the 20th century, living in many Northern and Eastern European countries during that time. He published an enormous number of writings in his lifetime, mostly analyzing different parts of Marxist economic theory, including his book “An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory” published in 1967. In regard to his participation in the Fourth International, European followers of Trotsky after his outcasting by Stalin, he is quoted as having said that, “The working class’s periodic upsurges into direct action create at the same time the conditions for resolving the crisis of the subjective factor, on condition that revolutionaries have been active in the movement for long enough, effectively enough and on a sufficiently wide enough scale....

April 12, 2016

Introduction for Twilight of the Idols

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche makes the reasonable case that what is required of the overman is a shift within reach of human instinct and not so much a great leap depicted as beyond our means. This goes in line with the perspectivism which becomes fully developed during this late period of his life, as included in the introductory part of the text. From another perspective a great leap is just a shift....

March 28, 2016

The American Psychological Association's Involvement in CIA Torture

Jean Maria Arrigo, among others, attempted to expose the crimes of the APA’s involvement in torture for over a decade before the information even began to become public knowledge. In COPS11 she and her colleagues divide operational psychology into two fields: adversial, which is highly suspect, and collaborative, which quite ambiguously serves to ‘optimize performance’. What then follows consists in a brief survey of recent developments in the field of American psychology from the beginning of the 20th century onward....

February 12, 2016

German Idealism’s Concept of Nature in the 19th Century

‘Of what avail, by the way, can philosophical systems be, which are only spun out of conceptions of this sort and have for their substance mere flimsy husks of thoughts like these? They must of necessity be exceedingly empty, poor, and therefore also dreadfully tiresome.’1 Schopenhauer, The Four-Fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason German Idealism must be read as an event culminating from the unique circumstances occurring during the late Enlightenment....

November 30, 2015

The Logical Form of Arguments and Conditionals

The logical form of an argument is made up of only symbol letters for simple sentences and operators that connect them together. One of the operators is the conjunction representing the english word ‘and’ which combines two simple sentences together. It can also itself be used repeatedly to combine a primary conjunction of two simple sentences together with a third one, or any number of further simple sentences. The premises of an argument can be conjoined together to make them one such compound sentence formed by conjunctions....

November 3, 2015