Abstract: The radical reformulation of Western philosophy proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas is the move beyond knowledge and being to ethics as metaphysics. For Lévinas this is accomplished as an escape, an evasion of being. Lévinas saw the story of Western philosophy as a tale that Being emanated, created, etc. an illusory pluralism that it will eventually…
Abstract: The following paper seeks to examine whether, from the standpoint of a transcendental idealist, it is possible to have a phenomenology that can adequately disclose the nature and activity of person. First I establish that symbols are intuitive concretizations of the activity of person/Geist, and thus symbols are available to phenom- enological description. Then I raise…
Abstract: It seems uncontroversial that persons have a particular ontology, and a temporal ontology at that. Yet attempting to “unpack” the intimate relation between the being of a person and time often leaves one frustrated and perplexed. Both Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson are explicitly concerned with the manner in which persons experience and understand time…
Abstract: Macmurray replaces the traditional philosophical standpoint of subject-as-thinker with self-as-agent, and only persons are agents. The unit of the personal is “I-and-you”; I become “I” when I distinguish myself from “not-I”, namely, “you”. Awareness of the negative begins in babyhood, as I learns I am dependent on a relationship with an Other who can fail to fulfil my needs. The…
Abstract: Usually philosophers worry about the existence of mind, or consciousness, or persons, or other difficult-to-explain phenomena. Having posited matter or nature, or fields, they wonder where can person or consciousness originate? This kind of thinking is backward. Only persons ask such questions. Persons exist. I turn the tables on the traditional problem of person by asking whether anything…
Abstract: In putting forth a view of economic agents as autonomous individuals driven by self-interest, mainstream economics precludes the possibility of gift. Gift could be found in non-market, “collectivist”, societies, where “informal” norms would include gift-giving. In this context, the paper argues that mainstream views regarding the impossibility of the concept of gift are inaccurate, via an…
Abstract: 150th anniversary of Marx’s Das Kapital calls for yet another contemporary evaluation of Karl Marx’s legacy. The article argues that Marx’s most important and the longest standing contribution into social science is not „historical materialism” nor any particular form of “critical theory” – it is the concept of capital…
Abstract: There have been several criticisms of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from the political Left. Perhaps the most frequent one has been that OOO’s aspiration to speak of objects apart from all their relations runs afoul of Marx’s critique of “commodity fetishism.” The main purpose of this article is to show that even…
Abstract: The discourse about commodification of time indicates that under the current socio-economic regime important values get systematically ignored. This paper reviews literature about the value of time in classical political economy, neoclassical economics, the household production approach, household economics, and activity models. Starting with neoclassical economics, all these approaches are…
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to trace how a perverted understanding of the human – of human nature, growth, and well-being – came to form the foundation for classical liberal economic thought and to identify some of the negative consequences of this development. My suggestion is that, in response to the social upheaval of the…