“Have you ever wondered why sociologists still study Marx if he was wrong?” (Erik Olin Wright, “Analytical Marxism”) This fragment grew into a series of YouTube videos: Rationalism and Socialism The time has come for socialists to reconsider Spinoza. As Macherey put it in his 1979 book Hegel or Spinoza, “the entire problem is that […]
Spinoza constitutes such a crucial point for modern philosophy that we might say in effect that there is a choice between Spinozism and no philosophy at all. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, as translated in Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza (2011) What is truth? Spinoza says a true idea is an idea that […]
You absorb more philosophy than you realize when you study math. Choices, commitments to specific philosophical doctrines, were collectively made long before our modern textbooks were written. As I attempt a transition to social science research, I feel I should revisit some of these choices. This document is a repository for reflections—basically diary entries—undertaken for […]