Below, I provide a summary of my favorite posts from the month in the order they were published. On passionate disagreement and self-identity argues that incorrigible disagreement fundamentally doesn’t arise from disagreement over present facts, but rather over disagreements about how present and past facts relate to a presently indeterminate…

There are no ideal reasoners — Yesterday, I showed that axiom commonly called ‘ought implies can’ (OIC), if applied to logical reasoning itself, implies that a good part of what are considered logically valid deductions in logic various logics, including the standard formalization of deontic logic itself, would have to be rejected. …

The standard axiom for deontic logic, (D), reads as follows: (D) OA → PA Where ‘OA’ is read as ‘A is obligatory’, and ‘P’ is read as ‘A is permissible’. An equally well known principle, albeit more controversial, is that obligation implies possibility. (OIC) OA → ♢A The principle the…

There are (at least) two ways in which the growth rate of an economy may be increased. The first is through an increase in the production of goods or services purchased, as occurred, for instance, when goods like automobiles, phones, computers, etc. first came to market. The second is through…

Public discourse on the nature of philosophy and the future of the philosophy profession currently divides into two camps. One pushes for philosophy to somehow be more public, to move away from specialization by reaching out to the masses. The other holds that the future of philosophy is bound to be more specialized, with different kinds of philosophy available for different subfields, categories of individuals, or even different economic sectors.

This week the blog put up three new posts. On the consequences of capital concentration and its addendum show how a wide variety of contemporary political problems are directly caused or otherwise conditioned by the concentration of capital according to class and location. What non-cooperative games can tell us about suffering for a cause discusses a simple, real-world example of a non-cooperative game — a traffic jam — and draws from it the broader claim that even the possibility of obtaining the best, most harmonious outcome for any group considered as a whole requires some of its members to suffer gratuitously, so long as the ideal conditions sought after fail to obtain.

How a common non-cooperative game can help us better understand how to live with others — The other day, I found myself stuck on the highway in traffic, which was caused by a lane that was blocked so workers could wash graffiti off of an approaching tunnel wall and trim trees reaching over the highway’s guard rail. …

In a previous post, I showed how a wide variety of problems, from rural poverty to data mining, are consequent on or otherwise conditioned as responses to the problem of the concentration of capital resources both geographically and by class. …

Most political problems arise out of this one, really big problem — 1 What is capital? The term ‘capital’ is used in several senses. In its most basic sense, ‘capital’ refers to physical goods that may be used in the production of other goods or services. In this sense, something as simple as a box of pencils counts as capital. In another sense, the term may…