Here is a just published lengthy entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Literary Louisiana
A travel article (who in N.O. talks of “the Big Easy”?)
. . . and realized, once again, that there’s no better place to find Walker Percy than inside the pages of his many dazzling novels, which I’d fallen in love with years ago.
Philosophy of markets
The very excellent Lisa Herzog interviewed here. H/T to Eric Schliesser.
The cliché is that Smith is a “negative liberty” guy and Hegel a “positive liberty” guy. In fact, both have very nuanced accounts of how different dimensions of freedom are realized in a modern society; the freedom to do what you want with your property – which is sometimes called economic freedom – is only one of them. For example, for Smith the market is also a school of autonomy, because it teaches individuals to become self-reliant and to take their own decisions about their lives; this may seem naive from today’s perspective, but it was written in a time when many people’s lives were predetermined by customs and traditions, and markets indeed had some liberating potential. What I find very interesting is that Smith and Hegel do not try to reduce freedom to one basic notion; rather, they acknowledge its various dimensions, and ask about the ways in which these can find a place in the institutions of a modern society. I find this very convincing as a way of thinking about freedom.
The Dead’s Terrapin Station
Speaking of Jerry . . .
Yes, I know that traditional Dead Heads are divided by this song. But so far as I can tell it really is in keeping with the Dead’s eclectic open-mindedness about not only music but artistic endeavor in general. I mean Jerry’s guitar at about 12:14 is a fantastic blend of jazz, rock, and going into gospely-operatic-monkish-cult chant as things unfold into the symphonic. The lyrics seem as they might fall apart each verse and then they are reined in again. The song is DEEPLY philosophical/religious without ever being ham-fisted . . . a rarity.
Lyrics by Robert Hunter. The song annotated here.
Hold away despair, more than this I will not ask.
Faced with mysteries dark and vast, statements just seem vain at last.
Some rise, some fall, some climb, to get to terrapin.
James Booker and Jerry Garcia
Bruce Caldwell on Hayek
The very excellent Bruce Caldwell (the general editor of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek) on Hayek — skip to 4 minutes in to avoid the preliminaries. At 59:40 The Sensory Order comes up.
Walker Percy Wednesday – 29
But it was worse than this in his case. It was more than being a Southerner. For some years he had had a nervous condition and as a consequence he did not know how to live his life. As a child he had had “spells,” occurrences which were nameless and not to be thought of, let alone mentioned, and which he therefore thought of as lying at the secret and somehow shameful heart of childhood itself. There was a name for it, he discovered later, which gave it form and habitation. It was déjà vu, at least he reckoned it was. What happened anyhow was that even when he was a child and was sitting in the kitchen watching D’lo snap beans, or make beaten biscuits, there came over him as it might come over a sorrowful old man the strongest sense that it had all happened before and that something else was going to happen and when it did he would know the secret of his own life. Things seemed to turn white and dense and time itself became freighted with an unspeakable emotion. Sometimes he “fell out” and would wake up hours later, in his bed, refreshed but still haunted.
When he was a youth he had lived his life in a state of the liveliest expectation, thinking to himself: what a fine thing it will be to be come a man and to know what to do—like an Apache youth who at the right time goes out into the plains alone, dreams dreams, sees visions, returns and knows he is a man. But no such time had come and he still didn’t know how to live.
To be specific, he had now a nervous condition and suffered spells of amnesia and even between times did not quite know what was what. Much of the time he was like a man who has just crawled out of a bombed building. Everything looked strange. Such a predicament, however, is not altogether a bad thing. Like the sole survivor of a bombed building, he had no secondhand opinions and he could see things afresh.
There were times when he was as normal as anyone. He could be as objective-minded and cool-headed as a scientist. He read well-known books on mental hygiene and for a few minutes after each reading felt very clear about things. He knew how to seek emotional gratifications in a mature way, as they say in such books. In the arts, for example. It was his custom to visit museums regularly and to attend the Philharmonic concerts at least once a week. He understood, moreover, that it is people who count, one’s relations with people, one’s warmth toward and understanding of people. At these times he set himself the goal and often achieved it of “cultivating rewarding interpersonal relationships with a variety of people”—to use a phrase he had come across and not forgotten. Nor should the impression be given that he turned up his nose at religion, as old-style scientists used to do, for he had read widely among modern psychologists and he knew that we have much to learn from the psychological insights of the World’s Great Religions.
JAZZ :: Emergence :: Improvisation :: Conversation
Michael Oakeshott and the Conversation of Modern Political Thought
Jesse Norman on Liberal Education/ Orsi on Oakeshott and International Relations
Listen to Jesse Norman’s Oakeshott talk.
Also an article recently published by Davide Orsi.
Introduction
Michael Oakeshott’s thought has been considered from a great variety of perspectives and has been interpreted in many, often divergent, ways. For example, scholars have placed his works in the context of the history of philosophy and they have highlighted their relationship with British and German idealism (Boucher, 2012; Nardin, 2001; Podoksik, 2010). His critique of rationalism, central planning and political dogmatism, as well as the contraposition between civil association and enterprise association, has been considered as a contribution to contemporary liberalism (Franco, 1990, 2004; Galston, 2012; Gamble, 2012; Giorgini, 1999; Gray, 1989: 199–216, 1993: 40–46; Haddock, 2005), conservatism (Abel, 2010; Devigne, 2012) and republicanism (Boucher, 2005; Callahan, 2013; Coats, 1992). However, it often goes unnoticed that his work has occasionally influenced international political theory. In particular, the dichotomy between civil association and enterprise association, developed in On Human Conduct (Oakeshott, 1975: 111–122), has been employed by Terry Nardin (1983) and Robert Jackson (2000) to revitalise the English School’s notion of international society, and, more recently, Nicholas Rengger (2013) has used it to interpret the evolution of the just war tradition (see also Astrov, 2005; Bain, 2003, 2007; Frost, 2002).
This article will elaborate on these works and will show the relevance of Oakeshott’s political philosophy for the contemporary constructivist debate in International Relations. First, I will argue that Oakeshott’s perspective stresses that political institutions are based on norms and relationships which result from human understanding. To this end, I focus on the distinction between civil association and enterprise association, with particular regard to the concept of authority, also in light of Oakeshott’s indebtedness to Hobbes. Second, I will contend that in On Human Conduct it is possible to find some considerations about world politics that are consistent with his broader political philosophy. Third, I will discuss Terry Nardin’s theory of ‘practical international society’ (1983, but also 1998, 2008), and the criticism of it made by Christian Reus-Smit (1999). With this discussion as a back- ground, I will contend that the theory of civil association may represent the ground for a constructivist understanding of international society: a relationship between states based on understood and socially constructed moral values. Finally, I contend that these shared moral values are substantiated in the norms of customary international law. As such, Oakeshott’s political and legal philosophy illuminates the possibility of an international legal order without a central legislative office or power. This is of particular importance, not just because of the Hobbesian influence on Oakeshott, but also because it sheds light on the historical nature of the criteria of conduct and on the obligations that states acquire, in their relations with other states and their populations.
manwithoutqualities 