The in-press intro to the themed issue on philosophical approaches to social neuroscience, freely available here.
I am not a story
Galen Strawson essay:
Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. So are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative?
The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics
Abating contingency: Michael Oakeshott’s political pluralism
New article in Philosophy and Social Criticism
Ivan Turgenev
Alternative Models of the Mind
The Spindel Supplement to The Southern Journal of Philosophy edited by Shaun Gallagher with top-notch lineup.
Walker Percy Wednesday 50
Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
Model of Civility
Aron strikes me as the very model of a responsible intellectual, a social philosopher of intellectual power and prudence who served his society with great courage and considerable style.
— John A. Hall. The Importance of Being Civil: The Struggle for Political Decency, Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 105
Couldn’t put it better. Take a moment to consider the number of public intellectuals whose boldness emanates from, as Taleb might say, because they have no “skin the game“.
Stanley Hoffman gets it:
Throughout his life, Aron had shocked the French by taking unfashionable stands, by flouting the conventional distinction between left and right, not because he liked to be provocative (to be sure, he did not mind it), but because of his passion against myths and prejudices, his need for intellectual lucidity, and his attachment to liberal values.
His greatest influence was teaching them how to think about history, politics, and society—or rather, how to think if one refused all “secular religions,” all philosophies of history that pretend to know the purpose and the march of mankind, that begin by rejecting the world as it is and aim at total revolution.
Main Currents of Sociological Thought (1960–1962) and the first volume of Clausewitz (a masterpiece of close textual analysis, interpretation, and erudition, written when Aron was seventy) are the best examples of his combination of empathy and critical penetration.
Aron’s vision of mankind was tragic . . .
Eighteen with a bullet
This song must rate as one of the greatest of all doo-wop songs and what is interesting is that it’s not American and it comes along a good 25 years after doo-wop’s heyday. Some say it’s a pastiche — it’s only a reflection of the times with more “knowing” lyrics. This said, the ground had already been laid by the late 60s with Zappa and the Mothers releasing Ruben and the Jets. I first fell in love with doo-wop via the bio-pic of Alan Freed but the rather anemic Sha Na Na to their credit, gave me a taster.
Walker Percy’s “Moviegoer” and the Aesthetics of Adversity
Stuart Mitchner in Town Topics
Percy intuits the possibility of a Katrina might seem a given, but what sets his book apart is its fortuitous all but prophetic awareness of something that did not take place until 15 years after his death. It’s as if the book had been created in the shadow of imminent catastrophe by a philosopher/novelist exploring the aesthetics of adversity while posing questions such as why the same man who feels bad in a good environment is “apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane.”
