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Butley

Alan Bates’ performance of a lifetime (and he’s had a few) deliciously embodies Simon Gray’s scathing insider’s perspective into the grim world of humanities academia (already that in 1971). Butley has much in common with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano insofar as all the action takes place in one day, everything falls apart, and alcohol is part and…

Gigerenzer papers

The most distinguished Gerd Gigerenzer has very kindly alerted me to some of his most recent writings. Roger and I were honoured to have Gerd participate in our co-edited Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon and moreover, with whom we spent an enjoyable time in San Francisco a couple years back.…

Liberty Fund Book Sale

Liberty Fund is offering a 20% discount on all their books and DVDs. (Use promo code JULY18 at checkout — expires July 31, 2018). Discount aside, their books are incredibly good value for money and are superbly bound. David Humefree speechFriedrich Hayekliberalityliberty fundMichael Oakeshott

Walker Percy, Philosopher (6)

Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. Diamonds in the Rough: The Peirce-Percy Semiotic in The Second Coming Karey Perkins Karey Perkins makes the case for the view that Percy is more than a novelist with occasional random existential musings or themes. Although Percy begins in existentialism, his coming across semiotics sparked Percy’s interest in language as the uniquely…

The Evolution of Computationalism

A terrific discussion of computationalism by the very excellent Marcin Miłkowski, freely available in Minds and Machines. [i]t is less misleading to think of computationalism as a diverse research tradition composed of multiple, historically variable computational theories of mind (or brain). By conflating the research tradition with one of the early theories, one could be tempted…

Music from Big Pink

To commemorate Canada Day and exactly 50 years since the release of this all-time classic album on July 1, 1968: i.e. Canada Day. To my mind, The Band stand as the greatest “beat combo” of them all with roots extending from Acadia down to Acadiana and back again with so much more in-between — thereby hitting…

How Adam Smith would fix capitalism

Jesse Norman in the FT. Look out for the forthcoming symposium on Jesse’s soon-to-be released book in C+T. The real Adam Smith is a vastly wiser and more subtle thinker. He forces us to discard the usual simplistic slogans and tired clichés. But more than this: he still has a vast amount to teach us,…

Stigmergy in a water environment

This is the first time I’ve come across discussion of stigmergy in a fluid (water) context. Check out this freely available paper here. Stigmergy is a biological phenomenon that has been adopted by robotics, referring to environmentally mediated communication where information about building actions is encoded in the partially built structure. For example, beavers build…

Ken Minogue

Five years ago my chum Ken got on a plane after a MPS meeting in the Galapagos and never awoke. What a way to go! Read his work. kenneth minogueLiberalismMichael OakeshottPolitical philosophyrationalism