Check out this scathing review published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 18th – Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 19, Page B5). Beyond any interest it may have to those who follow John Gray’s output, the review is salient to the recent “controversy” about philosophers being uncivil. My favourite line from the following review…
Tyler Cowen’s Washington Post review of Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales From Evolutionary Economics.
It is tiresome (and just downright false) for the Fundamentalist Right to claim that certain “alternative” lifestyles are incompatible with conservatism. In the first instance their grip on what conservatism is, is very weak and often at often at odds with the spirit of conservatism; and secondly, they do not appreciate that ideological categories are fluid and cannot…
Cass Sunstein writes on the TPM Blog that Hayek’s ideas of distributed knowledge “bear directly on open source software, wikis, prediction markets, and perhaps much more”. Yes, indeed. The mechanism that captures this aggregating phenomenon is called STIGMERGY: the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment. Indeed, much of what goes on in the complex…
Motivated by a brief paragraph posted by Colin McGinn, I offer the following thoughts. Mill’s Utilitarianism in Focus (1) Utilitarianism contains two essential components: (a) an axiology, i.e. a theory of intrinsic value (a theory of what we’re to take as good in itself or good for its own sake, and (b) a consequentialist ethical theory. The two…
My recent co-authored paper now available to download through MindPapers. The abstract: To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex…
Here is another finely crafted essay on Oakeshott, the man – written by someone who knew him well and who through his editoral activities, did much to bring Oakeshott to wider attention. This essay should be read along with Michael Oakeshott as a Character and Why Read Oakeshott? ======================================== By Timothy Fuller My first encounter with Michael Oakeshott was…
Some years ago I commissioned Noël O’Sullivan to contribute to the program for inaugural conference of Michael Oakeshott Association in 2001 which was held at the LSE. This is his beautifully crafted essay and is a companion piece to Ken Minogue’s portrait. ================================= When Leslie Marsh asked me to talk about the apparently simple subject, ‘Why…
In light of the level of interest shown in the Oakeshott audio that I recently posted, I thought this beautifully crafted personal portrait by one of the people who knew him longest, might act as a nice complement to further flesh out Oakeshott the man. It’s by Ken Minogue, who was for many years, Oakeshott’s colleague and friend.…
Narrated and interviewed by Michael Ignatieff Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
