----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
>It makes NO sense to claim the emergence of human beings was an
>accident any more than it makes sense to say that "it" was
>intended or planned.
It does somakesense. To say that it was an accident means it was not intended, planned, or otherwise necessary. What's your problem with that?
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Hello, anthropomorphism! One can only make sense of the notion of an accident in contradistinction to the notion of intention or plan; intention, plan/accident, error and the like are features of our descriptions of causal dynamics in physical systems. The systems themselves do not have intrinsic descriptions of their own processes. It makes no more sense to say nature has accidents than to say nature has plans.
Nor does it makes sense to say capitalism was
>an aberration-compared to what?
>
Feudalism. Brenner argues that cap emerged in England and not
France or
Poland because of a special concatenation of historical
circumastances that
made it rational for English asset holders to make sure that land
and labor
became alienable. This included: the Black Death and the decline
of
population in the the 14th C., the structure of the common law and
the
nature of land tenure in England as opposed to elsewhere, and a
bunch of
other, uh, accidents.
jks
==============
This is like saying Keynesianism is an aberration of Marshallian economics or art is an aberration of engineering or atheism is an aberration of theism. If everything is an aberration of everything else, nothing is an aberration. Feudalism is an ex post description of an epoch; the participants in that epoch didn't say "hey, we're the feudalists and anything that's not feudalistic is an aberration." Would we say that non-whites are an aberration of whites? I don't think so.......Your stretching the meaning of a referential term into contexts where it has no "place."
Ian