Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind remains as important as ever, and as misunderstood, 25 years after the 1980s culture wars. Allan BloomBloomClosing of the American MindHarvey MansfieldKarl PopperLeo StraussPlato
Here’s a review of K. Brad Wray’s Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology. (Wray, by the way, has been a strong contributor to EPISTEME). It’s also worth checking out Alexander Bird’s entry on Kuhn for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Kuhn is one of those thinkers whose work has been tarnished by academics who need an off-the-peg philosophical outlook…
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…
Look out for what might be best considered the results from a symposium on Alvin Goldman in his distinctive guise as epistemologist – distinctive in the sense that he’s been at the heart of “analytical” epistemology for the past 40+ years and has recently lead the charge to make social epistemology acceptable to analytical epistemologists.…
Here is a MS of my paper that was published here.
Here is a characteristically lucid piece by Ken Minogue on Oakeshott’s supposed conservatism. It should be noted that conservatism as Oakeshott understood it, is an anathema to “conservatism” understood in the American context. I take the view that these the terms are not at all helpful and are, for the most part, vulgarized. Oakeshott was…
Attributions of relativism to Oakeshott are twofold: The first, and the more common attribution, is from the general perspective of viewing Oakeshott as a postmodern relativist. The second, more technical aspect and less familiar attribution, involves the assumption that Oakeshott was a coherentist. I examine the second view first. On this assumption it is standard to…
Here is my introduction to the Zygon symposium on Oakeshott to appear in the March 2009 issue. This is an uncorrected proof – do not cite.
This past weekend I had the good fortune to be able to attend the Second Conference on Emergent Order and Society held in Portsmouth, NH. The term “conference” doesn’t really characterise the format – it is more akin to a colloquium where the emphasis is on genuine discussion and conversation in an intimate group (18 in all)…
A rather belated plug for this book. The follow up is currently being edited.
manwithoutqualities 