It is only recently that I learnt of the passing of George Feaver, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at UBC. He was great bar-room company who could, very articulately and with such aplomb, talk the hind legs off a donkey. Indeed, I recall one time when he had to be “pulled” off…
I want to bring your attention to the first issue of the on-line journal Studies in Emergent Order (papers are freely available). I was privileged to attend the recent conference associated with the Journal. A more eclectic and interesting group one couldn’t hope to find. To listen to and chat with Gus diZerega, David Emanuel…
The latest in Imprint Academic’s Oakeshott suite is now available – Vocabulary of a Modern European State Essays and Reviews 1953-1988. The table of contents and preface can be found here and Luke O’Sullivan’s editorial introduction can be found here. modern european state
The BBC are broadcasting a two-part programme on swarm behaviour. It’s worth checking it out for the terrific footage – not having had the sound on, I don’t know if anything conceptually interesting is discussed. I will revisit the programme with sound soon. Click here to view part 1.
In anticipation of the symposium on the Extended Mind that I’m editing for Zygon, I can now make available the abstracts. Mark Rowlands THE EXTENDED MIND The extended mind is the thesis that some mental – typically cognitive – processes are partly composed of operations performed by cognizing organisms on the world around them. The…
Programa Filosofia – Ceticismo x Comunicação – Michael Oakeshott. I found this on You Tube and supposedly references Oakeshott’s “The Masses in Representative Democracy”. I’ll have to ask João Carlos Espada (Catholic University of Portugal) about this.
Here is an imaginative way of surveying the stigmergic activity of an ant colony. (I’m sorry that these creatures were sacrificed in the interest of science but they still “rule the world” and we have much to learn from them – respect!).
Bernard Crick has died. About 10 years ago I had a brief correspondence with him hoping he’d be interested in attending the inaugural conference of the Michael Oakeshott Association. In Oakeshott circles, Crick was notorious for his snippy article on Oakeshott entitled “The World of Michael Oakeshott: Or the Lonely Nihilist”, Encounter, 20 (June 1963). From…
CC O’B’s obituary in today’s The Telegraph. I first came across him as the writer of the intro to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
In a post on the OUP blog Adrian Vermeule writes: The basic problem with “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is what we might call the Hayek Fallacy: a false comparison between the aggregate product of many minds and the product of a single mind. Perhaps that comparison is relevant in special contexts, such as…
manwithoutqualities 