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Season 4. Ep. - 9 - Mutual Credits With Ashley Buck

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CHAPTER

Introduction

Dive into the concept of mutual credit systems, discovering how individuals can exchange goods and services without conventional currency by providing credit to one another. The chapter traces the historical origins of these systems, their integration in human societies, and the transition from peer-to-peer credit arrangements to bank dependence, with Ashley providing insights on theoretical frameworks and real-world applications, showcasing the opportunities for decentralized finance and fostering community trust networks.

00:00
Speaker 4
That's one move. And the next move is from Manchester and engineering to Cambridge and philosophy. Can you briskly describe those two moves? OK,
Speaker 1
starting with Vienna. He was born in into a fabulously wealthy family, an immensely cultured family as well. The Wittgenstein family knew most of the leading cultural figures in Vienna at that time, and it was a particularly exciting period of Viennese cultural development. His sister was a friend of Freud. The family knew Brahms, Mahler. So he grew up at the cutting edge, so to speak, of musical, literary, intellectual culture. He actually, he was the youngest of eight children, and he was regarded as the slow one of the family. His brothers especially were immensely gifted. He chose to study engineering where his older brothers had tended to go into the arts. Two of his brothers committed suicide before he went to Manchester. One had wanted to be a composer, the other had wanted a career in theatre. and Wittgenstein's father, who practically owned the iron and steel industry in the Habsburg Empire, wanted them to follow him into business. Now, Wittgenstein had no ambitions to be a composer or a theatre director or a writer. His interests were in the sciences and engineering in particular. He went to a fairly ordinary realschule in Linz, which has become famous as the school that Adolf Hitler went to, and is distinguished for very little else. He then decided to specialise in engineering and went to Manchester originally to study aeronautical engineering. Now it's at Manchester that his philosophical interest developed. And very quickly they developed in this way that he was trying to design a propeller, which to a large extent is a mathematical task. So he became very interested in mathematics, started attending mathematics lectures at the University of Manchester, became interested in the question, what is mathematics? And that led him to read The Principles of Mathematics by Bertrand Russell. And being Wittgenstein, being used to going straight to the top, he didn't, you know, correspond with Russell or anything. He just went straight down to Cambridge and presented himself to Bertrand Russell at Trinity College and followed Russell everywhere. Russell, to begin with, thought he was mad and within a few months was persuaded that Wittgenstein was a philosophical genius. What was it about... That's a terrific summary, thank you very much. We had Freud, we had Hitler, we had Vienna, we had the Habsburg Empire,
Speaker 4
we went to aeronautical engineering, Manchester, that's a story in itself, but for another time. So what was it? Can you equally succinctly summarize what it was about this young man from Manchester that convinced Earl Russell, Russell, of his genius? It's very difficult to know. None
Speaker 1
of Wittgenstein's work from that period, that very early period, survives. Russell, in later life, told a story that after a month or so of regarding Wittgenstein as a madman, Wittgenstein came to him and said, you know, do you think I'm an idiot or not? And Russell said, well, I don't know whether you're an idiot. Write something on philosophy and I'll tell you. And after the Christmas vacation, Russell says, Wittgenstein produced some writing. We don't know what it was or what it was about. And Russell claims that after reading the first sentence, he said to Wittgenstein, no, you're not an idiot. We just don't know. The best guess is that Wittgenstein straight away was hooked by the problem left unresolved by Russell's book, The Principles of Mathematics. The unresolved problem there is one that comes from Russell's paradox, and in its broadest
Speaker 4
formulation, the problem is, what is logic? Yes, and we must emphasize how eminent Russell himself was at the time and how well-received
Speaker 1
that book of his had been. So when you said that Wittgenstein went to the top, he really did go to the top. Oh, yes. There were very few people writing on the philosophy of mathematics at that time, and Russell was certainly one of the most distinguished. The Principles of Mathematics had been published, and also when Wittgenstein met him, he'd just finished with Whitehead the three volumes of Principia Mathematica. Barry
Speaker 4
Smith, can you take us on from Ray Monk's, the platform he's given us there. So what have Wittgenstein and Russell working on together, the work which led to Wittgenstein's first great work, the Tractatus, Logical Philosophical, published in 1921. They're working on mathematics and logic. Can you bring those two together? Yes.
Speaker 2
Russell was very concerned with the nature of mathematics. He was himself a very distinguished mathematical scholar. If you begin to think what is mathematics about, you're puzzled by two things as a philosopher. One is that it's very certain. Propositions of mathematics are things we know with absolute surety same time we don't really know what mathematics is about if we talk about numbers what are they they don't seem to be in the world we don't bump into them they're not just products of our mind because we seem to be answerable to properties of mathematics not it's not under our control and volition so that suddenly makes the nature of mathematical truth deeply problematic. Why is this truth so hard and so certain, and yet its subject matter is so elusive? So at that time, Russell is working, basing his ideas on another philosopher in Germany, Gottlob Frege. And Frege had thought, perhaps we can reduce the truths of mathematics, in particular truths of arithmetic, to truths of logic. So now we've got a reduction to one problem. What's logic about? What gives us the status of certainty that logical propositions have? Now, Frege had a view that logic was the most general laws there were. They were laws of thought, but they were laws that governed an abstract realm of thought. We have to think of thoughts as not being in our heads, but as it were, all the possibilities of thinking out there in some abstract platonic realm. Logic governs that realm. Now, you can think of Wittgenstein and Russell as finding this a little bit too philosophically extravagant, a little bit too outré, now we want to know, can we domesticate logic? Can we find a place for logic in the world, in the natural world? And in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is very concerned to find a home for logic, but he knows that truths of logic, propositions of logic, are not descriptions of the world. So I know this is... You three are pouring a lifetime experience into
Speaker 4
these 45 minutes, but there we go. What did he do? Was there a central notion that he brought to bear on this, or was there a cluster of notions? What did he do? For example, what is his picture theory? Is that somewhere near the middle of what he was doing?
Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, maybe I can try to do two things at once. He's interested in how language is used by scientists and those who purport to describe the world to state facts, to describe the world and describe all the facts there are in the world. Now if language has as its job depicting everything that is the case, everything that we can say truly about the world, what about the propositions of logic? They don't seem to describe states of affairs in the world. They don't describe the arrangement of tables and chairs and people and cups and so on. So if truths of logic are true no matter how the world is, then here's the tantalizing thought. Maybe the truths of logic, if they stay true regardless of how things are in the world, they're not descriptions of the world, but they're, as it were, the boundaries of the world. They might show us the limits of what can intelligibly be the case. Now, combined with that, the idea that Wittgenstein sees a relationship between language and reality that goes something like this, and I'm having to be necessarily rough and crude here. If we've got a language which described all the arrangements of things in the world and all the facts of the world, take all those parts of language and think of all the possible recombinations of their parts that are legitimate, that the language allows. Now you describe all the possible ways the world could be, not just the way it actually is, but all the possible ways it could be. Language then, in describing all the possibilities there are, describes the limits of reality. So the limits of language are the limits of reality. And the boundaries of what's intelligible are the boundaries of logic. If you stray beyond logic, you're just not making sense.

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