ABSTRACT
This chapter represents Aristotle's thought with a series of algebraic formulae. Investigators have disagreed whether Aristotle holds that only the products of the members or sharers of a community, as he calls them, are incommensurable, or also the sharers themselves who produce the erga, or neither. Aristotle says that a doctor determines how to bring a patient to health by thought, while a house builder determines the house he builds by perception. Karl Marx, however, in his critique of Aristotle in Capital, claims that Aristotle's theory of political economy suffers from "the absence of any concept of value." Though Marx agrees with Aristotle that different work and different products are qualitatively different, contrary to Aristotle he also asserts that commodities are strictly commensurable because they all contain a common ingredient, which he calls menschliche Arbeit.
