When I was young, they were easy, but now a two hour class takes it out of me.
Next Monday, we spend two hours on Smith, Ricardo, and classical political economy. I am enough of a nerd to really enjoy this stuff but I am under no illusions about the students.
I promised them that after the Labor Day break, for the fourth class, I will take them on two imaginary field trips, the first to 16th century Notre Dame de Paris for a mass, the second to a local supermarket, a Food Lion, for a shopping trip. That will prepare them for chapter 1 of Capital.
17 comments:
They could read this in preparation:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2021/04/my-understanding-of-marx-part-iv.html
Or indeed this:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2021/05/one-small-point-of-clarification.html
What's scary is that he doesn't seem to have any memory of these earlier discussions, and keeps mindlessly recycling them. Some of the points made in the comments seem to be pretty devastating to his pet theory.
It sounds like a wonderful course. I am sure the students will get a great learning experience from it.
Cheers,
trane
My apologies if I have added some breaking news in political philosophy/world crisis to your blog comments, as I am interested in discussing Marx too but have been shocked by this assassination of a philosopher. More information is coming out that this event could have been a murder ordered by Putin himself to take out Alexander Dugin because 7 hours earlier Dugin had made critical remarks directed towards moving on from Putin to a new leader:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11137063/Vladimir-praises-Russian-patriot-killed-car-bomb-amid-funeral-Putins-Rasputin-daughter.html
If Putin killed off or attempted to kill a Russian political enemy and blame it on the Ukrainians, he is also likely to construct a nuclear plant accident and blame that disaster on others. August 24 is also Ukrainian Independence day and depending on which way the wind is blowing, things could happen fast. There are many reports now of internal Russian dissent by a Russian YouTube and telegram channel calling itself General SVR.
The world is exploding in conflict but I too want to study what Marx offers philosophers and find RPW's approach unique and interesting. "Karl Marx's Shandean Humour: Scorpion und Felix and Its Aftermath" (2013 essay) by Duncan Large cites RPW's Moneybags Must Be So Lucky and other non-RPW connected books in his footnote 48. A link to this essay:
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58127/1/Shandean_Humour_DL_Chapter.pdf
Another essay "Marx and Comedy" by Max Apple appears to be of less quality but I have not finished reading it:
https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/63170/article_RIP611_part1.pdf?sequence=1
Marx mixed texts designed for comic relief in with very boring texts of economic data and empirical descriptions, and he was a literary experimenter for sure. Why did Marx need, for himself and his audience, to use comedy in his philosophy?
2022 philosophy students have Wikipedia to consider as data, including a section on "Health" in their Karl Marx article which details a life of medical struggles and his many ailments from a lifestyle of excess including too much alcohol and tobacco, poor diet and sleep problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx#Death
Comic relief mixed with philosophy and political economy in these circumstances is not surprising, but highly reasonable.
I see that one of the Anonymi has launched into a critique of the Professor, calling it "scary" that he repeats much of his thinking, blog material etc.
I think it is great that commentators challenge the professor directly. SW does it now and again respectfully and with aplomb. However, I also think it behooves anyone who criticizes another, let alone the person whose blog it is, especially when the criticism is a tad personal, ought to use his or her name, spelled out for all to see. What a weenie.
Before we all go running off madly in pursuit of reports that too conveniently fit our prejudices, Tony, consider the source. To quote from another not always reliable source, namely, wikipedia:
"The Daily Mail has also been criticised for its unreliability, its printing of sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories of science and medical research,[17][18][19][20] and for instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement.[21][22][23][24] In February 2017, editors on the English Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail as a source."
In an attempt to refocus on Marx and RPW's lectures: wouldn't Marx have found such reports based on god knows what not worth the time of day. However much one may disagree with or dislike his analyses, as some commentators on this blog do, I thought he did at least try to present analyses, not tendentious rumours.
"Marxism and Comedy" by Max Apple (which I referenced by wrong title in comment above) is by an English professor from Rice University and mostly outdated concerns about aesthetic theories and socialist realism, with very little focus on Marx himself. I cannot find any date of publication, and it does not reference RPW or his approach to Marx. In any case, it is not a very useful argument for philosophers interested in Marx and comedy, or how comedy was used by Marx himself for comic relief and to further his political cause against opponents such as Proudhon.
James Wilson, The daily Mail is referring to facts which can be checked, such as Alexander Dugin's Telegram account which Google Translate will render for you in English:
https://t.me/s/Dugin_Aleksandr
Now, it appears that the message The Daily Mail quotes from (August 20 or 19, 7 hours before the bombing) with its critical tone about Putin, has been removed from the account archive now or at least I cannot find it. The Daily Mail is subject to British libel laws about such information, and must have checked its information, or Dugin could sue them for libel. Criticizing Putin as bad for Russia and saying there must be "internal transformation" online would be enough at this point of crisis to get you killed by Putin's cronies.
On August 23, 2022, the UN Security Council is having an emergency meeting about preventing a nuclear power plant accident in southern Ukraine, and we will see if Russia ends its occupation, or something really horrible happens and Putin blames it on Ukrainians. It is difficult to navigate the disinformation and separate it from correctly verified information about terrorist actions/murders at this point, and reasonable people normally sit back and don't panic. Does the world have time for Putin to turn out to be a reasonable man after all, or not?
The "health" section for the Karl Marx article on Wikipedia has multiple sources and scholarly literature references, but adds some psychological analysis of how Marx's skin condition may have given him temperamental flavour or extra anxiety and anger. Marx's theories and writings can be abstracted from his health, and evaluated philosophically or ideally in that way, or they can be understood through applying the materialist theory of history directly to his own life and biography, resulting in a ultra-realistic picture of a struggling human being with much more complexity than many other humans.
Apologies to our host but it seems recent events lie heavy on Prof. Couture's mind. Perhaps this article on other biblical issues (http://arcto.ru/article/1655) by Dugin will be of interest.
"However, it seems that this custom has a much older history than the events of the Exodus, and goes back to the time when the Semitic tribes represented a single people. It is known that among the Phoenicians related to the Jews (a people called in the Scriptures "Canaan") the custom of sacrificing children existed for quite a long time, causing disgust among neighbors who had long abandoned human sacrifices. However, among the people of Israel, as well as among many others, the custom of sacrificing children, namely, the first-born, took place in ancient times..."
"In this sense, the episode with the sacrifice of the daughter of Jephthah is indicative (Judges 11:30-40). A courageous girl asks her father to give her some time to mourn her virginity. After that, she voluntarily goes up to the altar, and the father "made his vow over her, which he gave." Why is it important for her to “mourn her virginity”, and not her young life itself? Because neither she nor her descendants will be able to give birth to the Messiah - which all Jews still dream of."
"However, this is not the only case in the Old Testament when parents sacrifice their firstborn children to God. The most revealing thing here is that which took place in Israel, as well as among many other peoples, the so-called. “building sacrifices” (Josh. 6:26; 1 Kings 16:34)."
"I will not give all examples of child sacrifices in the Old Testament now, for details you can refer here..."
I vote either the FSB, the GRU, or the SVR plus the old man.
aaall, why does the name at the top of the post you quoted say Marina Golubina?
Anon, good question and good catch - I'm several decades rusty on Cyrillic. The sidebar lists books by Dugin which is probably the source of the error on the feed I used. Too good to be true, I guess. Still believe a false flag is the best option.
Here is an alternative take on Aleskandr Dugin (the Russian philosopher who may have been targeted in the apparent car-bombing that took the life of his daughter, a philosopher and political activist in her own right, in Moscow this past weekend), from someone who worked on the faculty with him and who translated one of his books, Mark Sleboda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBO9UElgi5I
I have been following some of Sleboda's commentary on the Ukraine-Russia conflict over the past few months. (I mentioned his name here in the past.) So far, just about everything he has said has proven accurate--the opposite of what Western corporate media and the US government have been saying.
In this interview, which I have only just begun to listen to, Sleboda says that the narratives being spun about Dugin in the West are inaccurate propaganda. He says in particular that the epithet "Putin's brain" that many in the Western press are using could not be further from the truth, and he notes that the Kremlin worked to get Dugin fired from his academic post and had him deplatformed from most of Russian media after Dugin disagreed with the government's policy toward Ukraine in 2014. (Following the Odesa massacre, which was perpetrated by ultranationalist Ukrainian neo-Nazis, Dugin had been demanding a Russian military intervention on behalf of ethnic Russians in the Donbas, but the Kremlin opposed taking any aggressive military response then.)
I don't know much about Dugin. I have not read any of his writing. But after seeing Prof Couture's posts this past weekend, I listened to a couple of Youtube interviews involving him, one that included Dugin himself (along with Francis Fukuyama and Ivan Krastev)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIiKiDnMSFw
and the other with then-political science PhD student Michael Millerman, who had translated several of Dugin's books and had taken an interest in Dugin's philosophy. (Millerman took a lot of heat over this interview from his UofToronto faculty, and several of his doctoral committee members reportedly resigned in protest over what they viewed as his endorsement of some of Dugin's ideas. AFAIK, Millerman left academic philosophy after finishing his doctorate)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFI6fg8NITg
I did not find anything nearly as objectionable in the ideas discussed in those two interviews as I have been reading about Dugin in major English-language news sources in the past few days.
I do not agree with Dugin's apparent social conservatism on religion, gender roles(?), and issues like gay marriage. But on the issue of multipolarity in global affairs and his opposition to Western imperialism, I would tend to side with him versus with the US establishment. That said, the fact that Dugin and his daughter have been linked to many alt-right figures in the US gives me pause. Again, I don't know much about him; but I don't trust Western media to provide a fair analysis, the situation with Russia being what it currently is.
Several of the comments above have referred to Aleksandr Dugin and his daughter, Darya, as philosophers. I submit that there is a significant difference between having a philosophy, especially a philosophy relating to geo-politics and state sovereignty, and qualifying as a philosopher. Aleksandr Dugin’s writings and general pronouncements did not deal with issues of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, classical philosophy, the history of philosophy, etc. He expressed such views as, “We are on the side of Stalin and the Soviet Union,” and described himself stating, “We, conservatives, want a strong, solid state, want order and healthy family, positive values, the reinforcing of the importance of religion and the Church in society.” Granted, these views express a philosophy, but they hardly qualify their proponent as a legitimate philosopher, and to use that attribution to describe him does a disservice to legitimate philosophers, e.g., Prof. Wolff, and those whom college students study in a philosophy course.
Likewise his daughter, Darya, who, although her degree from the Moscow State University was devoted to the political philosophy of late Neo-Platonism, may have qualified her as a student of philosophy, it hardly qualified her to be described as a philosopher in her own right. After she graduated college, she worked as a journalist for the state-controlled media outlet RT and the pro-Kremlin channel Tsargrad. She also served as the chief editor of the United World International website which asserts that it is owned by Yevgeny Prigoazhin, an ally of Putin. I have seen no indication that after she graduate college that she wrote anything remotely related to philosophy. Reiterating, the fact that she had a political philosophy supporting Russian and its actions in Ukraine, does not qualify her as a philosopher.
I propose that the term “philosopher” should be reserved to those who deserve the attribution, either by virtue of their writings or by virtue of their teaching career, not by simply by virtue of having and espousing a philosophy on any topic whatsoever.
Point taken. Call Dugin a "political theorist" and Dugina a "political commentator" then.
Dugin has at least written a nearly 500-page book on Heidegger (that I have not read), and apparently has lectured on and given interviews on platonism ("Political Platonism: The Philosophy of Politics"). Was Macchiavelli a philosopher? Was Ayn Rand? Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit? ;-)
Eric,
I am pretty sure a tomato is a fruit, since it has seeds.
As Wittgenstein pointed out, the meanings of some words, e.g., "game," has a broad range of applications. So does the word "philosopher." I suppose writing a 500-page book about Heidigger, assuming it is not juat a biography, would qualify its author as a philosopher, but certainly not Dugin's daughter, who has written nothing about philosophy since she graduated from college.
MS: A tomato is indeed a fruit--in fact, it's a berry. This is one of the few things I remember from the botany part of my introduction to biology course back in 1967 or thereabouts (or thenabouts).
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