A Lesson from CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien [w]e moderns are increasingly fleeing from “conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas.” Also Oakeshott on conversation: In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to…
This Oakeshott reference from Colorado College’s website, notable because many so-called “liberal” arts colleges are only nominally “liberal” in the Oakeshottian sense. Check out Oakeshott’s essay “A Place of Learning” and other essays of his from The Voice of Liberal Learning. Paul Franco has written an essay for the “Companion” entitled “Un Début dans la…
I chanced upon this freely available review of Rorty’s notorious PMN (30th anniversary edition). It reminded me that I’d read PMN long before reading Oakeshott and that coming across Rorty’s invocation of Oakeshott’s conversational metaphor had no resonance for me. Even though I’m not in sympathy with Rorty and Oakeshott’s relativism I’m amazed at the…
Here’s a piece from The Spectator written by, I suspect, John Casey. It looks like it’s dated 25 May 1985. Paul Franco gave it to me a few years ago and I’d folded it into a book and forgot about it. Click image a few times to enlarge.
manwithoutqualities 