Around the Rules

‪“If the practices in which norms are implicit are understood simply as regularities of performance, then there is nothing the practitioner need already understand… . The norms implicit in regularities of conduct can be expressed explicitly in rules, but need not be expressible by those in whose regular conduct they are implicit.” —Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit

∴ No regress in the appeal to norms (regularities of performance) as an account of “knowing-that.”

Brandom on Sellars, regularism, and the rule following paradox suggested in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations § 201

“In commodity exchange the action and the consciousness of people go separate ways.”

“The question we ask is, what is the historical origin of our logical ability to construct mathematical hypotheses and the elements contributing to them?”

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour

“So it’s a rare analytic department today that has those exclusionary tendencies. Systematic thought has returned, as has the esteem for the history of philosophy, not as an antiquarian discipline but in providing the language in which contemporary philosophy is done. These are part of the conventional wisdom today. Every once in a while, one will still hear echoes of the older, more hard-edged tone, but that is already somewhat anachronistic.”

Robert Brandom

FRESH_ED: Do you think Marx would’ve been a good academic?

DAVID HARVEY: No! He’d been terrible. He wouldn’t have gotten tenure anywhere. First off, nobody would have known what discipline to put him in. I have a bit of that problem. I mean I come from Geography, but a lot of people think that I’m a sociologist or something else. But…so he doesn’t fit in easily into any discipline. Secondly, he didn’t complete much of his work. And I always used to have this little thing on my desk. He had a letter from his publisher that said, “Dear Herr Professor Marx: It’s come to our attention that we have not yet received your manuscript of Das Kapital. Would you please furnish it to us within six months or we’ll have to commission somebody else to write this work.”

FRESH_ED: Do you know if he met the deadline?

DAVID HARVEY: No, of course not.

Spielberg moves left of liberal in his excellent The Post. The film implicates both Parties and their major players in the extension and expansion of the Vietnam War and the thousands who died because of it. A celebration of free press as labor, love, and civic duty—our responsibility to resist in the Mario Savio sense. Not blanket anti-government, but an allegorical FU to Trump.