For those who have asked — yes, the “Companion” is available digitally via Project Muse.
Propriety and Prosperity: New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith
Galleys have now been generated for this collection. Here is the finalized table of contents.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
List of Figures
Foreword by Vernon L. Smith
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
List of Abbreviations
1: Introduction: Epistemology not Ideology: David F. Hardwick and Leslie Marsh
Part I: Context
2: Adam Smith as a Scottish Philosopher: Gordon Graham
3: Friendship in Commercial Society Revisited: Adam Smith on Commercial Friendship: Spyridon Tegos
4: Adam Smith and French Political Economy: Parallels and Differences: Laurent Dobuzinskis
5: Adam Smith: Eighteenth–Century Polymath: Roger Frantz
Part II: Propriety
6: Indulgent Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator: Joshua Rust
7: Adam Smith on Sensory Perception: A Sympathetic Account: Brian Glenney
8: Adam Smith on Sympathy: From Self-Interest to Empathy: Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo
9: What My Dog Can Do: On the Effect of The Wealth of Nations I.ii.2: Jack Weinstein
Part III: Prosperity
10: Metaphor Made Manifest: Taking Seriously Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’: Eugene Heath
11: The ‘Invisible Hand’ Phenomenon in Economics: Gavin Kennedy
12: Instincts and the Invisible Order: The Possibility of Progress: Jonathan B. Wight
13: Two Invisible Hands: Family, Markets, and the Adam Smith Problem: Lauren K. Hall
14: Smith, Justice, and the Scope of the Political: Craig Smith
Low
Thirty-seven years on this record has lost none of its bleak power, a truly adult record in a sea of rock banality:
As a recovering cocaine addict, Bowie’s songwriting on Low tended to deal with difficult issues: “There’s oodles of pain in the Low album. That was my first attempt to kick cocaine, so that was an awful lot of pain. And I moved to Berlin to do it. I moved out of the coke center of the world [i.e., Los Angeles, where Station to Station was recorded] into the smack center of the world. Thankfully, I didn’t have a feeling for smack, so it wasn’t a threat.” Visconti contended that the title was partly a reference to Bowie’s “low” moods during the album’s writing and recording.
See Philip Glass and Bowie discuss their collaboration:
Cities and Private Planning
My chum and editor of C+T has just had this book published. I learnt much from his companion volume of a few years ago.
D.G. Myers
A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 72
“Irene!” Santa said angrily. “You all the time thinking of that boy, and with all the trouble he’s giving you. You better wake up, babe. If you had any sense, you woulda had that boy locked away at Charity Hospital a long time ago. They’d turn a hose on him. They’d stick a letrit socket in that boy. They’d show that Ignatius. They’d make him behave himself.”
“Yeah?” Mrs. Reilly asked with interest. “How much that cost?”
“It’s all for free, Irene.”
“Socialized medicine,” Mr. Robichaux observed. “They probly got communiss and fellow travelers working in that place.”
“They got nuns operating the place, Claude. Lord, where you all the time getting this communiss stuff from?”
“Maybe them sisters been fooled,” Mr. Robichaux said.
“Ain’t that awful,” Mrs. Reilly said sadly. “Them poor sisters. Operating for a buncha communiss.”
— p. 228.
Extensive enactivism: why keep it all in?
This open access from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from representationalism toward pure, empirical functionalism fails to provide a substantive “mark of the cognitive” and is bereft of other adequate means for individuating cognitive activity. It also argues that giving proper attention to the way the folk use their psychological concepts requires questioning the legitimacy of commonsense functionalism. In place of extended functionalism—empirical or commonsensical—we promote the fortunes of extensive enactivism, clarifying in which ways it is distinct from notions of extended mind and distributed cognition.
New Orleans: A Living Museum of Music
New Orleans is a city where cultural tradition matters. In New Orleans there is a balance between innovation and tradition. Improvisation never comes out of nothing. It is always rooted in history . . . in New Orleans. So this is an environment where people sort of backslide into the future.
I’d say that churches and bars are the two most important places in New Orleans.
H/T to Shannon Selin. Littered with some of the standard cliches for the first 5 minutes, but then it gets going.
Oakeshott conference details: Hull 2015
See here.
Extended cognition and the explosion of knowledge
The aim of this article is to show that externalist accounts of cognition such as Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) “active externalism” lead to an explosion of knowledge that is caused by online resources such as Wikipedia and Google. I argue that externalist accounts of cognition imply that subjects who integrate mobile Internet access in their cognitive routines have millions of standing beliefs on unexpected issues such as the birth dates of Moroccan politicians or the geographical coordinates of villages in southern Indonesia. Although many externalists propose criteria for the bounds of cognition that are designed to avoid this explosion of knowledge, I argue that these criteria are flawed and that active externalism has to accept that information resources such as Wikipedia and Google constitute extended cognitive processes.
manwithoutqualities 