I know that I may well cop a lot of flack disclosing that I’m a fan of David Stove. One colleague called Stove the worst curmudgeon he’d ever come across, a writer that had the ability to rub many constituencies up the wrong way. Be that as it may, I find Stove a great writer…
Seeing an announcement for an upcoming conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of Joe Raz‘ The Morality of Freedom nudged me to post recordings of a similar conference held to commemorate the book’s 20th anniversary with no less than Raz himself in attendance. Part 1: Part 2: Part 3:
A nice piece (via my chum David Livingstone Smith) entitled “A Philosopher in Love“: The “chief triumph of art and philosophy,” he wrote years before meeting Boufflers, is that it “refines the temper” and “points out to us those dispositions which we should endeavor to attain, by a constant bent of mind and by repeated…
A fascinating talk by (ontology kingpin) Barry Smith entitled “John Searle and Hernando de Soto: The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality.“
Today marks the death of Robert Nozick one of the most versatile philosophers of the last quarter of the 20th Century. The more I read Nozick, the more astonishing his talent seems to be. He writes with such subtle twists about so many issues from politics to epistemology to identity to consciousness, to ethics to…
Here is a recently published entry on F.H. Bradley for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. To my mind, Bradley was the most formidable of the British idealists. I treasure my first edition copy of Appearance and Reality.
Religion, Politics and the Future of Liberal Education: The Tenth Anniversary Meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association, 2001-2011 UNIVERSITY OF TULSA OCTOBER 13-16, 2011 2011 marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Michael Oakeshott Association, a group established to encourage the critical study of one of the twentieth century’s most important political philosophers.…
At last here is the book in which my essay “Ryle and Oakeshott on the know-how/know-that distinction” appears, masterly edited by Corey Abel. A draft of the paper can be found here. Don’t get hung up by the use of the word “conservatism” in the collection’s title – Oakeshott’s conservatism bears no resemblance to those…
I want to give a plug for this new book edited by James Connelly and Stamatoula Panagakou. They have worked tirelessly in keeping interest in idealism alive and have brought together a who’s who of experts in this field. However unfashionable and derided idealism might be, I for one still find it a fertile tradition…
Here is an unlikely appreciation of Oakeshott by Robert Paul Wolff self-described as: “in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist.” Wolff seems to appreciate the quality of Oakeshott’s mind and of course his mellifluous style and doesn’t get bogged down in one-dimensional ritualized…
manwithoutqualities 