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Walker Percy Wednesday 163

The road is better than the inn, said Cervantes-and by this he meant that rotation is better than the alienation of everydayness. The best part of Huckleberry Finn begins when Huck escapes from his old man’s shack and ends when he leaves the river for good at Phelps farm. Mark Twain hit upon an admirable…

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

Born on this day, that most subtle, civilized, cultivated, elegant, insightful, humane and liberal quality of mind. For all things Oakeshottian check out the Michael Oakeshott Association, the unaffiliated Michael Oakeshott Society, loads of stuff on this site including a very rare BBC recording of Oakeshott on the philosophy of history, and last, but no means least, A Companion to…

A hundred years of consciousness: ‘a long training in absurdity’

The very excellent Galen Strawson’s Isaiah Berlin Lecture from earlier this year. Highly unusual indeed to spot a footnote to Hayek’s TSO — so that’s rather good news. Also in anticipation of a review I’ve commissioned for Shaun Gallagher’s recently published Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind, Shaun has made available the book’s intro: see here. behaviourismconsciousnessenactivismFriedrich HayekGalen StrawsonPhilip…

Walker Percy Wednesday 162

THE MAN ON THE TRAIN THERE is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reversed and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated…