Steven Nadler writes in Aeon that “At a time of religious zealotry, Spinoza’s fearless defence of intellectual freedom is more timely than ever.” This fundamental liberal value is of course foreign to the regressive left. In his distress over the deteriorating political situation in the Dutch Republic, and despite the personal dantheoger he faced, Spinoza…
Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster in Spiked Review. Perhaps it is this yearning for a Catholic Shakespeare that must be given up in order to see Hamlet aright and see ourselves in its light. Perhaps we will have to dispense with the ghost’s prayer for an unadulterated life, for Catholic absolution, for an absolute. Hegel…
The twelfth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Rouslan Koumakhov Social identifications are one of Herbert Simon’s most recurrent themes. Starting with Administrative Behavior (hereafter, AB) (Simon, 1947/1997), he investigates that theme throughout his scientific work on an impressive number of occasions. Perhaps…
We venture to say that self-reinforcing sorting mechanisms now make the discipline unapproachable by anyone who is unabashedly classically liberal. — full article. This was all true (and patently obviously so) even thirty years ago. I, however, got very lucky — I had the amazing Paul Hirst as a tutor. Almost ten years ago I…
What can a man with a plain name who lived over 200 years ago tell us about life today? Who was The Real Adam Smith? And why should we care? In this two-hour, two-part documentary, Swedish author, commentator and Cato Senior Fellow Johan Norberg explores Adam Smith’s life, his ideas about morality and economics, and…
Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely…
It’s been thirty years since arguably the last great works of liberal political philosophy in the analytical tradition appeared, setting aside Rawls’ Political Liberalism from 1993. The Morality of Freedom is freely available — click image. David GauthierJohn Rawlsjoseph razLiberalismmoral philosophyperfectionist liberalismPolitical philosophy
His words still shape our consciousness, even if we fail to read him. This is not due to some hackneyed idealism (“tilting at windmills”), but rather to his pervasive impact on the genre that taught us to think like moderns: the novel. He pioneered the representation of individual subjectivity and aspiration, which today undergirds the…
Time for something gastronomical. Without doubt the best pickled Okra I’ve had. Double the price of your standard supermarket bottle, but really worth it. And from Brooklyn! Really smokey, the Islay of pickled veg. gastronomyokrapicklesqualiaRick FieldRick’s Picks
Richard Heersmink’s new EM paper. Cognitiondistributed cognitionExtended MindExternalismmetaphyicsnarrative selfpersonal identityPhilosophy of mindsituated cognition
manwithoutqualities 