Recently, the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill published with Monthly Review Press a new book titled Who Paid the Pied Pipers of Western…

As I argued in in The abuse excuse: determinism and moral responsibility, B. F. Skinner’s claim that human behavior is shaped by…

Imagine trying to decide between two competing explanations of the same phenomenon, when neither can be conclusively proven right or wrong…

Recently, I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion by email on how the the theories of Ivan Pavlov, B. F. Skinner, and Lev Vygotsky…

The Cold War did much more than divide the world geopolitically. It divided the world intellectually. In the West, that meant structuring…

Introduction-Toward a Humanistic Synthesis The contemporary crisis confronting human civilization is best understood as a triple crisis: a crisis of philosophy, a crisis of political economy, and a cr...

The following discussion build some of the previous discussions, on this site, on such matters as positivism versus antipositivism, the…

From what I wrote on the now defunct LBO-Talk list back in 2018. Should be of interest in light of the contemporary revival of fascism.

Over on the Marxmail discussion list, in the thread on “Why do Marxist economists avoid using math, and what kind of conclusions do they…

Probably the best theoretical arguments against socialism are the socialist calculation arguments that were first -presented by Ludwig von…

Different people will have different reasons for opposing the teaching of philosophy at the university level. In many cases, such…

Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher best known for his rethinking of Marxist theory, particularly his structuralist approach…

One important aspect of the case for atheism is a rejection of the traditional arguments for the existence of God as being unsound. More…

The following is from a presentation that I did for the Cambridge Philosophy Cafe several years ago on the topic — Does Religious Language…

1. Orthodox Marxism and Popularizing Marxist Theory

For more than two hundred years, Hume scholars have been debating over whether or not he was an atheist, an agnostic, or some sort of…

The classic critique of Marxist economics is Böhm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx And The Close Of The His System. Notice that this online version of…

In the Soviet Union, the economics profession was divided into two branches: the political economists and the mathematical economists, with…

The classic critique of Marxist economics is Böhm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx And The Close Of The His System. Notice that this online version of…

The economist Milton Friedman was a noted advocate of the view that free market capitalism and political democracy are linked together.

To my mind, the notion of a being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent (not to speak of omnipresent) is a load of rubbish — especially in light of the problem of evil.

Thanks for reading!

I do tend to think that he is overrated as a public intellectual. Here I will concentrate mostly on just one of his books, Enlightenment…

Positivism is not a specifically left-wing or right-wing philosophy. In the 19th century, Auguste Comte, the man who coined the label…

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have been and continue to be controversial subjects. But, as I point out here, E. O. Wilson’s…

Nikolay Chernyshevsky

It is noteworthy that Trump has presented several different and conflicting rationales for the new tariffs.

There is no one school of thought that can be designated as “Marxist psychology.” Historically, Marxists have embraced a wide variety of…

A number of years ago, I picked up in a used-book store a copy of Professor Loren R. Graham’s book, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior…

A 21 st -Century Perspective on the "Socialist-Calculation Debate" re: Economic Planning

Well, back in 1975, the Soviet mathematician and economist Leonid Kantorovich shared the Nobel Prize in economics (alongside the American…

Los Angeles was primed to burn – by human error and human greed.

Well, particular understandings of evolution have been proven wrong over the years. That is why one can say that over time, the theory of…

Jean-Paul Sartre’s relationship with Marxism was complex, multifaceted and rather nuanced, reflecting his efforts to reconcile his…

Jean-Paul Sartre was never a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) but was often a close fellow traveler for a good many years. He did…

Joan Robinson’s 1962 book Economic Philosophy was one of economist Joan Robinson’s most interesting books.

David Laibman has made, in my view, an important contribution to the recent literature on historical materialism with his Deep History. In…

People often think that because libertarians purport to be antistatist they would necessarily be anti-fascist. But such is not necessarily…

https://open.substack.com/pub/rickheller/p/mindfulness-of-socialism?r=51wei&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

In his own day, David Hume was best known for being a historian. His History of England was a bestseller of its day. Hume of course also…

The American physicist David Bohm was noted, among other things for his causal or “hidden-variables” interpretation of quantum mechanics…

Walter Cronkite in The 21st Century

I think that it is possible to draw upon Darwinism by way of analogy to understand the evolution of social and political institutions, as I…

More than sixty years ago, the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture (University of Cambridge) on “The Two…