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Walker Percy Wednesday – 26

I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether this vocation is best pursued in a service station…

Walker Percy Wednesday – 25

“One last question to satisfy my idle curiosity. What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together—or was it only I who spoke—good Lord, I can’t remember—of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?” Another cry and the ramoneur is…

Holger Peterson: ambassador of the blues

No-one knows more about the blues than Holger. No-one is as enthusiastic as Holger. He is such a pleasure to listen to unlike his CBC cohort — a lazy, irritating, name-dropping ex-member of a beat combo that merely trades on his name and is prima facie guilty of nepotism. (And his program runs on a thoroughly tenuous premise). bluesHolger Petersonmusicradio

On Hating and Despising Philosophy

Bernard Williams in the LRB reprinted in Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002. An update, see: The London Review of Books. As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it. I do not want to exaggerate, in a self-pitying or self-dramatising way, the present extent or intensity of this dislike; I…

The ‘Invisible Hand’ Phenomenon in Philosophy and Economics

Here is the intro to Gavin Kennedy’s chapter. This chapter discusses Adam Smith’s rhetorical use of the ‘invisible hand’ in the context of his teachings on metaphors as figures of speech in his lectures on Rhetoric (Edinburgh, 1748-51; Glasgow, 1752-64 (LRBL). After Smith died (1790), a strikingly long-period of silence about his three references to…

Kermit Ruffins: We Partyin’

When the ever ebullient Kermit says “we partyin’” he means it. This is a wonderful upbeat, warm and affectionate selection of mostly classics without ever falling into cliched kitsch — always with a nod and a wink in the direction of the boss man Louis Armstrong. His band is really smokin’ and the guest vocalist…

The consciousness myth

Nice paper from Galen Strawson. Hayek’s The Sensory Order (1952) is missing though (salient extract below). See also Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology. Hayek’s discussion of the mind–body problem speaks directly to a topic that has dominated philosophy of mind for the past 35 years – qualia (quale for singular), a term of art that…