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Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in Correspondence

Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi corresponded with each other for the best part of thirty years. They had shared interests that included science, social science, economics, epistemology, history of ideas and political philosophy. Studying their correspondence and related writings, this article shows that Hayek and Polanyi were committed Liberals but with different understandings of liberty,…

The Mangy Parrot 5

It was not yet common, in that illustrious college, that seminary of the learned, that ornament of knowledge for the metropolis—it was not yet common, I was saying, to teach modern philosophy there in all its aspects; its lecture halls still resonated with the ergos of Aristotle. There you could still hear debates over the…

How Do Our Social Networks Affect Our Health?

Nicholas Christakis (yes, the very same that had been in the news recently, unfortunately caught in the midst of campus fuckwittery) explains how face-to-face social networks and their structures influence behaviors and phenomena in human society and the natural living world. (H/T to Guy Theraulaz). NPR/TED Video/Audio. collective behaviorcommunicationcontagiondistributed cognitionemergent orderExtended MindgeneticsNetwork ScienceNicholas ChristakisSocial networkSwarm behavior

Rationality and the true human condition

The fifth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Ron Sun The notion of rationality is important to many fields in social and behavioral sciences. Herbert Simon’s seminal work on “bounded rationality” and “satisficing” led to broadened conceptions of rationality, which significantly impacted a number of…

John McWhorter: public intellectual par excellence

In a crowded field of public intellectuals, John McWhorter stands head and shoulders above most. He has a genuine commitment to the Socratic method (i.e. intellectual honesty), never peddling an over-rehearsed hardened position that he’s been married to since the year dot. One always feels that he really values the provisionality of intellectual discourse and is always…

David Egan’s last stand

Our great Southern songwriter lays in a recliner, feet propped up into a blanket that covers legs made thin by a cancer whose patience has worn out. Those legs used to amble around one hell of man — a tall, ruggedly handsome man’s man and raconteur gifted in music and conversation. — full article here.…

Walker Percy Wednesday 74

In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are. ***** I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst…