Lawrence Krader Livres

Noetics is Lawrence Krader's magnum opus, which he began while still an undergraduate philosophy major at the City College of New York in the 1930s. By examining the architectonics of some of the greatest thinkers in history - Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl among others - as works of art combining myth, speculation and empirical science, Krader tackles one of the central problems of the philosophy of science: what is science and how does it relate to human thinking and knowing more generally. Building on his theories concerning the different orders of nature adumbrated in his Labor and Value (2003), he follows not only the lines of development of the three fields of science corresponding to three orders of nature (material, quantum, and human) but also examines the development of all three as human processes and products. Krader takes up the relations of thinking and knowing in conjunction with emotions, feelings and judgment and examines the processes of abstraction as one of the key and unique features of human being and knowing. He proposes noetics as a science of thinking and knowing and establishes its relation to the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the arts. The breadth and depth of Krader's scholarship is stunning and evokes Spinoza's thought that «all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.»

Labor and Value reexamines the history of the theories of labor and value from Aristotle to the present. It seeks to combine in a systematic way the leading theories of objective and subjective value. It breaks new ground in subjecting both theories to a radical historical and anthropological critique. Set within a newly conceived theory of the orders of nature, it finds the treatment of both theories problematic in that each treats its subject matter pars pro toto. Lawrence Krader identifies both conceptual and terminological confusion in the traditional discussion of labor and value by writers within the Marxist tradition. He also demonstrates the negative consequences of abandoning an objective foundation in value theory on the part of the Austrian School in spite of its important contribution on the side of subjective value. This book revisits and deepens the discussion on labor as it was developed by Aristotle, Hegel and Marx.

Die modern-bürgerliche Gesellschaft und der Kapitalismus umfassen die Neuzeit und finden ihren Anfang in der Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts. Die Behandlung dieses Epochenwandels durch Marx, Weber, Troeltsch, Schumpeter, Pareto und Braudel wird hier kritisch auseinandergesetzt. Nach einem Überblick der theoretischen Auffassungen werden die Arbeitsprozesse dargestellt. Sodann werden die Zeitmessung und das Zeitbewußtsein, die Maschinerie, die Mechanik und die Geometrie behandelt. Im besonderen werden die Arbeitsprozesse im Berg- und Hüttenwesen aufgrund der Vorstellungen von Agricola und das Ständewesen von Hans Sachs analysiert. Form und Substanz der Freiheit werden in ihrer Beziehung zur Arbeit im Zeitalter des Frühkapitalismus neu bestimmt. In einem Schlußkapitel wird die kulturhistorische Stellung Europas in der Welt behandelt.