How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods. Seaford argues (...) that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal. (shrink)

Systematic dialectic is distinguished from historical dialectic and its logic explored. As a strategy of exposition designed to articulate the forms of a given whole it orders the relevant categories in a linear development. The dialectical justification of the transitions is the central question addressed. What is given progressively as the further determination of the abstract beginning should be read retrogressively as a grounding movement validating the earlier categories from the perspective of the concrete whole.

In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

The Hegelian dialectic, which goes beyond analytics based on formal logic, constitutes an essential component of Marxian thought. Yet a simple and straightforward introduction to the subject is hard to come by, due especially to confusion over the issue of materialism versus idealism. The following is a methodological primer in the dialectic of capital, a Marxian economic theory dialectically stated. Just as Hegel's "logic coincided with metaphysics," Marx's "coincides with economics.".

Systematic dialectic is distinguished from historical dialectic and its logic explored. As a strategy of exposition designed to articulate the forms of a given whole it orders the relevant categories in a linear development. The dialectical justification of the transitions is the central question addressed. What is given progressively as the further determination of the abstract beginning should be read retrogressively as a grounding movement validating the earlier categories from the perspective of the concrete whole.

First published in 1999, this volume from Dr. Jonathan E. Pike is original and provocative and integrates sources from the history of ideas, analytical philosophy, and contemporary social theory. Pike has produced an overall account of Marx which focuses on the concept of human potential and clearly explains its ontological basis. Anyone interested in Marx studies will be indebted to this incisive discussion of the philosophical foundations of Marx's work.

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart explore the ability of complicated rules to generate simple behaviour in nature through 'the collapse of chaos'.

This book provides a contemporary assessment of Marx's theory of money. This theory is often praised as one of Marx's greatest achievements, especially when compared with either classical or neoclassical economics. On the other hand, Marx's theory of money has also been severely criticized, especially that it seems to require that money be a produced commodity. The contributors to the volume provide a wide-ranging and in-depth appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of Marx's theory of money, compared to other theories (...) of money. (shrink)