Maurice Dobb was the foremost Marxian economist of his generation in Britain. He was noted for his contributions to value theory, the theory of economic planning and the analysis of Soviet economic development. This set will re-issue 7 of his most important works.

Mr Dobb examines the history of economic thought in the light of the modern controversy over capital theory and, more particularly, the appearance of Sraffa's book The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which was a watershed in the critical discussions constituted a crucial turning-point in the history of economics: an estimate not unconnected with his reinterpretation of nineteenth-century economic thought as consisting of two streams or traditions commonly confused under the generic title of 'the classical tradition' against (...) which Jevons so strongly reacted. (shrink)

Part of an eleven-volume set which contains all of Ricardo's published and unpublished writings, and provides great insight into the early era of political economics.

This paper provides an empirical and conceptual account on seeing machine learning models as part of a sociotechnical system to identify relevant vulnerabilities emerging in the context of use. As ML is increasingly adopted in socially sensitive and safety-critical domains, many ML applications end up not delivering on their promises, and contributing to new forms of algorithmic harm. There is still a lack of empirical insights as well as conceptual tools and frameworks to properly understand and design for the impact (...) of ML models in their sociotechnical context. In this paper, we follow a design science research approach to work towards such insights and tools. We center our study in the financial industry, where we first empirically map recently emerging MLOps practices to govern ML applications, and corroborate our insights with recent literature. We then perform an integrative literature research to identify a long list of vulnerabilities that emerge in the sociotechnical context of ML applications, and we theorize these along eight dimensions. We then perform semi-structured interviews in two real-world use cases and across a broad set of relevant actors and organizations, to validate the conceptual dimensions and identify challenges to address sociotechnical vulnerabilities in the design and governance of ML-based systems. The paper proposes a set of guidelines to proactively and integrally address both the dimensions of sociotechnical vulnerability, as well as the challenges identified in the empirical use case research, in the organization of MLOps practices. (shrink)

This is an attempt to determine the character of Antonio Gramsci's Marxism by way of a critical analysis of Luciano Pellicani's "Gramsci: An Alternative Communism?" His interpretation is that, except for a peaceful revolutionary strategy, Gramsci is a typical Marxist-Leninist. This is criticized by pointing out that it is largely grounded on non-Gramscian texts, that its references to Gramsci are primarily to an intermediate phase of his development, and that its construal of the mature texts of the Prison Notebooks does (...) violence to the contexts of the passages quoted. The criticism strongly points in the direction of either an original Gramscian communism or a Gramscian noncommunism. (shrink)

This paper studies consumers’ reactions and resistance to being responsibilized for making climate-friendly food choices. While resistance to consumer responsibilization has been studied from an individual experiential perspective, we examine its collective characteristics. We do this by tracing the controversial marketing campaign of a Swedish poultry producer, encouraging consumers to “do something simple for the climate” by eating chicken rather than beef. In our analysis of social media comments and formal complaints to the consumer protection authority, we mobilize Foucault’s notion (...) of counter-conduct to analyse subtle forms of resistance to consumer responsibilization. We identified four interrelated yet distinct forms of consumer counter-conduct: _challenging truth claims, demanding ‘more,’ constructing ‘the misled consumer,’_ and _rejecting vilification._ By theorizing these counter-conducts, we demonstrate how consumers collectively contested both the means and ends of responsibilization—but not the underlying premise of individualized responsibility. Thus, our study helps to explain how consumers’ resistance reproduces, rather than undermines, responsibilization. (shrink)

THIS paper seeks to elucidate the phenomenon known in psychology as 'the specious present,' by postulating a two-dimensional theory of the extensional aspects of time. On this theory, the usual logical and psychological difficulties, encountered in current accounts of this phenomenon, can be resolved. For, when there are two dimensions of time, the same event may be without extension in one of these dimensions ('transition-time'), while it is nevertheless finitely extended in the other of these dimensions ('phase-time'); so that in (...) a definable sense the phases of a finitely enduring event, though successive in one time-order, yet are contemporary in the other. The epistemological standpoint implicit in the paper is generally similar to the one Bertrand Russell has put forward, in his Physics and Experience (Cambridge, 1946), and his Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (London, 1948) (allowing for the changes which would be required in Russell's theory to take into account a second time dimension). A 'psycho-neural parallelism,' or one-one correspondence, is postulated between features of certain 'experiential events' (namely, those experiential events normally held to be happening to some person's mind, which are describable in the language of psychology); and features of certain 'physical events' (namely, those events described in the language of physics, chemistry and physiology, which are ordinarily conceived as happenings in that same person's body). These physical events are conceived of as being causally connected with events in the physical world outside the experient's body, by means of the concepts of light waves, sound waves, chemical stimuli, and consequential processes in the nervous system (central and peripheral) and sense-organs, in the usual way. In terms of this psycho-neural parallelism the physical correlate of the finite temporal span of the specious, or experiential present, is to be found in certain consequences of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics; according to which there is a finite interval of time necessarily associated with a nearly precise determination of energy levels, and of transitions between them. Some of the physical implications of this theory, applied to processes in the material structure of the human body, are discussed qualitatively. But, for the reasons given in the last section of the paper, a quantitative treatment is not yet possible. The paper is greatly indebted in regard to the physical application of the two-dimensional theory of time, to the discussion of the pentadic group structure in Eddington's Fundamental Theory (Cambridge, 1946 and 1950); and in particular to the treatment there of the phase-variable as the 'time-analogue' in the quantum statistics of stationary states. (shrink)

Winner of the 1974 National Book Award The product of many years of reflection on phenomenology, this book is a comprehensive and creative introduction to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Natanson uses Husserl's later work as a clue to the meaning of his entire intellectual career, showing how his earlier methodological work evolved into the search for transcendental roots and developed into a philosophy of the life-world. Phenomenology, for Natanson, emerges as a philosophy of origin, a transcendental discipline concerned with (...) consciousness, history, and world rather than with introspection and traditional metaphysical warfare. (shrink)

Embodied Care is the first work to argue for the body's centrality to care ethics, doing so by analyzing our corporeality at the phenomenological level.

Dans Folioplus philosophie, le texte philosophique, associé une oeuvre d'art qui l'éclaire et le questionne, est suivi d'un dossier organisé en six points :Les mots du texte : Corps, entrelacs (chiasme), chair ; L'œuvre dans l'histoire des idées ; La figure du philosophe ; Trois questions posées au texte : Y a-t-il une chair de l'image? L'accès à l'être implique-t-il la neutralisation du sensible? Y a-t-il une chair de l'histoire? ; Groupement de textes : L'écriture et l'image: l'existence, la mort (...) ; Prolongements. (shrink)

This paper explores Benjamin’s and Adorno’s materialist critique of the philosophy of history as a metaphysical fiction which harbors and shields the barbarism at the heart of culture. Each undertakes a radical critique of ontological, future-oriented notions of temporality and history, proposing instead a political understanding oriented to the past for the sake of the present or, more precisely, for the sake of actively resisting the persistent barbarism. The more culture insists on its progress beyond barbarism, the more it claims (...) to have overcome the past, the more insidious and invidious are its forms of oppression. I follow the consequences of Benjamin’s emphasis on the nihilism constitutive of philosophy of history by analyzing his claim that even the dead are not safe from the threat of annihilation. Second, I argue that Adorno’s radical critique of a culture and politics oriented toward the future, or rather to overcoming the past, constitutes an active resistance to the insidious barbarism at the heart of democracy. (shrink)

[1] The early years, 1878-1923 -- [2] The middle years, 1923-1945 -- [3] The later years, 1945-1965.

In this short essay, I report results from a representative national dataset from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program that shows that significantly more men than women intend to major in philosophy at the high-school and pre-university level. This lends credence to pre-university effects hypotheses of women's underrepresentation in philosophy and successfully replicates a smaller analysis performed by Cheshire Calhoun at Colby College in 2009. I also defend my analysis against an objection that claims that intention to major is not a (...) good predictor of final major selection. Finally, I argue that this new analysis should lead to further investment in university-level diversity programs. (shrink)

How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? Maurice Halbwachs addressed this question for the first time in his work on collective memory, which established him as a major figure in the history of sociology. This volume, the first comprehensive English-language translation of Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge. Halbwachs' primary thesis is that human memory can only function within (...) a collective context. Collective memory, Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behavior. Halbwachs shows, for example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries evoked very different images of the events of Jesus' life; how wealthy old families in France have a memory of the past that diverges sharply from that of the nouveaux riches; and how working class construction of reality differ from those of their middle-class counterparts. With a detailed introduction by Lewis A. Coser, this translation will be an indispensable source for new research in historical sociology and cultural memory. Lewis A. Coser is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the State University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Boston College. (shrink)

The _Matter of the Mind_ addresses and illuminates the relationship between psychology and neuroscience by focusing on the topic of reduction. Written by leading philosophers in the field Discusses recent theorizing in the mind-brain sciences and reviews and weighs the evidence in favour of reductionism against the backdrop of recent important advances within psychology and the neurosciences Collects the latest work on central topics where neuroscience is now making inroads in traditional psychological terrain, such as adaptive behaviour, reward systems, consciousness, (...) and social cognition. (shrink)

This book presents a coherent and systematic exposition of the mathematical theory of the problems of optimization and stability. Both of these are topics central to economic analysis since the latter is so much concerned with the optimizing behaviour of economic agents and the stability of the interaction processes to which this gives rise. The topics covered include convexity, mathematical programming, fixed point theorems, comparative static analysis and duality, the stability of dynamic systems, the calculus of variations and optimal control (...) theory. The authors present a more detailed and wide-ranging discussion of these topics than is to be found in the few books which attempt a similar coverage. Although the text deals with fairly advanced material, the mathematical prerequisites are minimised by the inclusion of an integrated mathematical review designed to make the text self-contained and accessible to the reader with only an elementary knowledge of calculus and linear algebra. A novel feature of the book is that it provides the reader with an understanding and feel for the kinds of mathematical techniques most useful for dealing with particular economic problems. This is achieved through an extensive use of a broad range of economic examples.This is suitable for use in advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses in economic analysis and should in addition prove a useful reference work for practising economists. (shrink)

In this short essay, I report results from a representative national dataset from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program that shows that significantly more men than women intend to major in philosophy at the high‐school and pre‐university level. This lends credence to pre‐university effects hypotheses of women's underrepresentation in philosophy and successfully replicates a smaller analysis performed by Cheshire Calhoun at Colby College in 2009. I also defend my analysis against an objection that claims that intention to major is not a (...) good predictor of final major selection. Finally, I argue that this new analysis should lead to further investment in university‐level diversity programs. (shrink)