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Martha Argerich as a child

Martha Argerich’s intimate relationship with Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor began when she was 10 when she performed the concerto in its entirety at Buenos Aires’s Theatre Colón with Washington Castro conducting Orquestra Sinfonica de la Ciudat de Buenos Aires. Martha ArgerichpianoSchumann

Machine behaviour

New survey paper in Nature inspired by Herb Simon. Sciences of the Artificial is an excellent and very accessible book that feature’s heavily here. In his landmark 1969 book Sciences of the Artificial, Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon wrote: “Natural science is knowledge about natural objects and phenomena. We ask whether there cannot also be ‘artificial’ science—knowledge about artificial…

Oakeshott and Hayek: Situating the Mind

The theme of rationalism provides Leslie Marsh with the opportunity to compare Oakeshott with another important critic of rationalism, Friedrich Hayek, in his essay “Oakeshott and Hayek: Situating the Mind.” Invoking Oakeshott’s famous dismissal of Hayek in “Rationalism in Politics,” Marsh makes the case that Oakeshott got Hayek plain wrong. If one understands both men…

Valhalla Vodka

It’s been a while since something interesting on the boozy front has come my way. This vodka has flavour (without being actually flavoured) coming from a residual barley mash that hasn’t been fully filtered out. This really is sipping vodka, no need to mix this stuff though a decent mixologist could do something subtle with…

The Fate of Rationalism in Oakeshott’s Thought

Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism is taken up in greater depth in Kenneth Minogue’s essay “The Fate of Rationalism in Oakeshott’s Thought.” Minogue, Oakeshott’s longtime colleague at the LSE, focuses his analysis on the posthumously published manuscript The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, believed to have been written somewhere around 1952. This manuscript…