Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Saturday, October 30, 2010

The market as metaphysics


Marx told us that a man could "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner." Is Elie Ayache, derivatives trader and philosopher, what he had in mind?

Here are three links to a three-part video of Ayache discussing his book The Blank Swan, his interpretation of the market as exhibit A for seeing contingency as absolute and irreducible, metaphysically speaking; a fundamentally un-modellable set of contingencies to which the notion of probability is only pertinent by analogy.

I've been postponing putting something up on this, thinking I would come up with some really intelligent preamble to introduce it, but between other commitments and being under the weather, I haven't devoted any attention to writing about it at all. But if metaphysics and money have anything to say to each other, this book is more than a precis of the conversation. Is capitalism in practice just a special case of hyper-chaos?

Or could it be an instance of quantum-indeterminacy crystallizing into macro-specificity, as Willliam Orem suggests here?

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