Author: manwithoutqualities

Browse by:
michael oakeshott

Oakeshott on friendship

Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a…

art

Largest Private Collection of Islamic Art

It’s one of those delicious cultural ironies (of course there are a few other examples) that a significant amount of Islamic art preservation (and more besides) is down to one Nasser Khalili, a Jewish Iranian-born academic and former art dealer. Ownership is nothing but a myth, we are only a temporary custodian of what we…

walker percy

Walker Percy Wednesday 94

Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which? Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion,…

complexity

Complexity Explained

With my good chum Péter Érdi at The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers mega shindig. Check out Peter’s excellent book (the title is as bold as Dennett’s Consciousness Explained) and now that Peter is head honcho for Cognitive Systems Research consider submitting something to them — it’s a very ecumenical journal with a nice balance between the philosophical and…

Nick Lowe

Nick Lowe @ the Beeb

The immensely talented, subtle, dignified and classy Nick Lowe performing live for BBC4. Nick’s Christmas show last year was the most satisfying live show I saw last year. Catch him if you can — real musicianship, not bread and circuses. musicnick lowe

Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey and Don Boudreaux on ‘Bourgeois Equality’

I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian libertarian. That description would flummox the regressives’ crude social ontology and their perversely illiberal hierarchy of victimhood. Anyway, it’s well-worth listening to the very kind and deeply talented Deirdre McCloskey whom I had the good fortune to meet in…

freedom of speech

Chuck Norris vs Communism

Very roughly analogous to the corrosive effects that the internet has been to our out-of-touch and typically regressive gatekeepers, so too was VHS the corrodent to the Romanian communist state. Now, as then, these gatekeepers entertain the shallowest of insights into the dynamics of situated moral psychology, deluded by their lazy rationalistic disparaging of “low brow” culture, the elites of all…

Eric Ravilious

Eric Ravilious 1903–1942

Born on this day — IMHO one of the greats. (b London, 22 July 1903; d off Iceland, 2 Sept. 1942). British watercolour painter, printmaker, and designer. In addition to paintings, his highly varied output included book illustrations and book-jackets, and designs for furniture, glass, textiles, and the Wedgwood pottery factory (notably a mug commemorating…