Robert Paul Wolff

最近在看康德 Kant的第一批判，然后碰巧看到诗人奥登 Auden写于1954年关于《魔戒》LOTR第一部的评论。 To present the conflict between Good and Evil as a war in which the good side is ultimately victorious is a ticklish business. Our historical experience tells us that physical power and, to a large extent, mental power are morally neutral and effectively real: wars are won by the stronger side, just or unjust. At the same time most of us believe that the essence of the Good is love and freedom so that Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to be good. ...

video the thought of Marx lecture01 Jan 15, 2011 lecture02 Jan 16, 2011 lecture03 Jan 17, 2011 lecture04 Jan 19, 2011 lecture05 Jan 24, 2011 lecture06 2011 lecture07 2011 the thought of Karl Marx part 10, Jan 28, 2011 blog Karl Marx (1818-1883): the theorist of capitalism, the historian of economic theory, a great economic theorist. dialectical materialism was Engel’s idea. Analytical Marxists: Gerald Cohen, KARL MARX’S THEORY OF HISTORY, Jan Elster, MAKING SENSE OF MARX Robert Wolff: Marx considers the philosophy of a society to be a part of its ideological superstructure, along with its religion, law, and art, among other things. Moral judgments are a part of the philosophy and law of a society, hence ideological and superstructural as well. The fundamental principle of bourgeois justice is that equals be given for equals in a free and open marketplace where men [it is always men] meet one another as legal equals, none compelled by law or custom to enter into bargains with another. The ideal capitalist, Marx argues, pays a fair price for the labor he employs. He pays a price equivalent to the reproduction cost of that labor, which, as he and Ricardo would say, is equal to the labor value embodied in that labor. Now, to be sure, capitalists do not play fair. As Marx tells us in the great chapter on The Working Day, capitalists try such underhanded tricks, in their effort to extract more value from their workers, as fiddling with the clocks in the factory so as to make the workers labor for a bit longer than the contracted for ten or twelve hours. But this is not exploitation. This is just cheating. ...

Start to read the blog of Robert Paul wolff. Start to watch his lectures on Kant. video blog part 1 Reading the Critique Part I part 2 reading the Critique Part II part 3 reading the Critique Part III part 4 reading the Critique part IV part 5 reading the Critique part V part 6 reading the Critique part VI part 7 reading the Critique part VII part 8 reading the critique part VIII part 9 reading the Critique part IX From the wiki page: Kant builds on the work of empiricist philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume, as well as rationalist philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff. He expounds new ideas on the nature of space and time, and tries to provide solutions to the skepticism of Hume regarding knowledge of the relation of cause and effect and that of René Descartes regarding knowledge of the external world. This is argued through the transcendental idealism of objects (as appearance) and their form of appearance. Kant regards the former “as mere representations and not as things in themselves”, and the latter as “only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves”. This grants the possibility of a priori knowledge, since objects as appearance “must conform to our cognition…which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.” Knowledge independent of experience Kant calls “a priori” knowledge, while knowledge obtained through experience is termed “a posteriori”.[2] According to Kant, a proposition is a priori if it is necessary and universal. A proposition is necessary if it is not false in any case and so cannot be rejected; rejection is contradiction. A proposition is universal if it is true in all cases, and so does not admit of any exceptions. Knowledge gained a posteriori through the senses, Kant argues, never imparts absolute necessity and universality, because it is possible that we might encounter an exception. ...