Chris Dillow — Rationalism, rationality & reasonableness

Chris Dillow is writing bout the dialectical approach in contrast to the categorical approach and apparently doesn't realize it even though he is a Marxian economist. What is is saying is to adopt the principle of rational inquiry in one's own thinking by critiquing oneself and becoming one's own interlocutor and devil's advocate. This is fundamental to critical thinking, in contrast to dogmatic thinking, for example.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Rationalism, rationality & reasonableness
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

S. Artesian — Of Love and Hegel

Review of Blade Runner 2049.

The Wolf Report:Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investor
Of Love and Hegel

S. Artesian

Xinhua — Xi's world vision: a community of common destiny, a shared home for humanity

The chief value for Western liberalism is personal freedom. The chief value for traditional Chinese culture is harmony. 

President Xi is positioning China to reassert its traditional role as the Middle Kingdom, which can also be rendered as Central Realm or even Center of the World based on harmony among all peoples.

Economically, this pits the market state, in which distribution is based on competition among wants, against the welfare state, in which distribution is based on a constellation of needs.

This is often or usually characterized in the West as the distinction between a free market economy and a command economy, but it is actually different approaches to a managed economy, since government necessarily plays key roles in each. There are many such approaches possible and some of them have already been tried.

The looks like it may be the beginning of a new stage in the historical dialectic as China and other non-Western countries become developed countries capable of competing with the West not only economically and militarily but also in the conflict of ideas that drives the historical dialectic from the Hegelian point of view.

In in the view, different ideas clash in the conflict of ideas and some have their moment as dominant before being replaced by a fresh idea in the succeeding moment. However, the idea that is replaced is also subsumed and continues to influence historically. 

A previously subsumed idea may also reemerge subsequently in a fresh form to do battle in the conflict of ideas that drives history. Chinese traditionalism is reemerging in a fresh form to confront the dominant liberalism of West on the world stage. 

They will both be subsumed in another moment in the series of moments that constitutes the temporal unfolding of the historical dialectic. What that might look like then we can only guess at now.

Ecns.cn
Xi's world vision: a community of common destiny, a shared home for humanity

Xinhua

Nick Johnson — Marx and Engels on the dialectics of nature

I've left a couple of comment there.

The Political Economy of Development
Marx and Engels on the dialectics of nature
Nick Johnson

Nigel Warburton — Talk With Me

...Conversation without critical judgment becomes mere chatter and airing of different opinions — as William Empson wrote in his poem ‘Let It Go’ (1949):

"The contradictions cover such a range.The talk would talk and go so far aslant.You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there."

However, it was John Stuart Mill who crystallised the importance of having your ideas challenged through engagement with others who disagree with you. In the second chapter of On Liberty (1859), he argued for the immense value of dissenting voices. It is the dissenters who force us to think, who challenge received opinion, who nudge us away from dead dogma to beliefs that have survived critical challenge, the best that we can hope for. Dissenters are of great value even when they are largely or even totally mistaken in their beliefs. As he put it: ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.’

Whenever philosophical education lapses into learning facts about history and texts, regurgitating an instructor’s views, or learning from a textbook, it moves away from its Socratic roots in conversation. Then it becomes so much the worse for philosophy and for the students on the receiving end of what the radical educationalist Paolo Freire referred to pejoratively in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) as the ‘banking’ of knowledge. The point of philosophy is not to have a range of facts at your disposal, though that might be useful, nor to become a walking Wikipedia or ambulant data bank: rather, it is to develop the skills and sensitivity to be able to argue about some of the most significant questions we can ask ourselves, questions about reality and appearance, life and death, god and society. As Plato’s Socrates tells us, ‘These are not trivial questions we are discussing here, we are discussing how to live.’

Aeon
Talk with me
Nigel Warburton