As with all lists, this is bound to be contentious – and of course this being NOLA you can have wildly delicious food without going to a fancy eatery. Of the top-10 I have only been to one – the perennial Commander’s Palace. And yes, it did live up to being one of my most memorable meals, competing with Le Bernardin for one, which is high praise indeed.
Extended Mind meets Hegel
Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence
In my view it is because, as an unknown sage once remarked, “it ain’t what we don’t know that causes trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.” I cannot think of any other significant field of knowledge where the prevailing wisdom, not only in society at large but among experts, is so beset with entrenched, overlapping, fundamental errors.
Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History
In the countdown to October 19th here is the intro to Geoff Thomas’ chapter:
Omnis determinatio est negatio, says Spinoza: to specify the nature of anything is also illuminatingly to say what it is not. This remark, whatever its general force, applies exactly to Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy of history. Oakeshott is a polemicist, a prince of skeptics, throughout his writings on the nature of history. To be sure his position can be characterized positively: he is a constructionist. He holds that the historical past is an inferential construction from present experience. So, clearly enough, here’s the first negative: Oakeshott rejects any idea of the reality of the past. The past does not exist; if it did, the historian would not need to construct it inferentially or in any other way. It would just be there, open to investigation.
The non-reality of the past is a major negative theme. Another of Oakeshott’s principal themes, that of the autonomy of history, also carries heavy negative implications. Oakeshott has a strong sense of the autonomy of history. Historical inquiry has its own internal impetus. It defines its own problems, poses its own questions, and has sole authority in regard to its methods. Its practitioners also decide who is a good or competent historian. Oakeshott’s insistence on autonomy is not accompanied by very much if anything of a methodology of history as a specific craft of inquiry. But it does carry some punchy negatives. One of these is a rejection of scientific categories from historical explanation. More precisely, Oakeshott will have nothing to do with causal explanation in history. The notion of cause is a mistaken intrusion — an outside interference — from the scientific realm. Nor is science the only source of irrelevant categories. The realm of practice sends its saboteurs into historical inquiry, and the price of history is eternal vigilance against them. Practice obtrudes its unwelcome attentions in three ways: one, by seeking to use history as a repository of practical wisdom, as a guide through analogies and parallels to the current world; two, by moral judgment on historical phenomena; and three, by false teleology, projecting ends, goals, processes as inherent in the course of historical events. It is hardly too much to say that Oakeshott’s positive theory of history is a coda to the rehearsal of these errors: the errors of assuming the reality of the past, of applying the category of causation to historical inquiry, and of allowing the intrusion of practical considerations into the work of the historian. In his own terms Oakeshott is concerned with “the philosophy of history” in the sense of an inquiry “about the nature of historical truth and the validity of historical knowledge” (WIH 203). He is not occupied with the methodology of historical research (e.g., how to decide whether there are too many or two few word-dividers on a putative Ugarit tablet) or with speculative delineations of great historical patterns such as we find in St. Augustine’s de Civitate Dei, in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History or in Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
Is Jazz Dead?
Here is a critical review of a book that I haven’t yet read. The review rightly touches on several meta-issues in Jazz but whatever insights Duncan Heining’s review offers and whatever perhaps legitimate criticisms he levels against the target author, Heining’s political sociology itself comes over as a sophomorish off-the-peg conceptual apparatus so characteristic of circles where there is no genuine philosophical culture.
While Nicholson does attempt to link what he sees as the cultural conservatism of Marsalis et al with the political conservatism of Reagan and Bush, he fails to analyze the processes involved or their political implications and consequences. On the one hand, he appears to suggest that the repositioning of jazz within American culture is a radically inspired move, setting this against an America where the right was in the ascendancy. On the other, he sees the way in which this has been achieved as having consequences for the music, which have stifled innovation and restricted opportunity for many US musicians. Yet, Marsalis-Murray-Crouch achieved their goal of moving jazz to the centre of American mainstream culture not merely by linking it with the high culture of classical music and dance. They did so by turning it into a commodity, both in its traditional economic and Marxian senses.
Kid Ory
Write-up from NOLA.com: ‘Kid’ Ory bio research took author 15 years; ‘the music is why we care,’ he says.
John McCusker’s website
Kid Ory was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader.
A Kid Ory jazz band in California, 1922. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and was widely considered New Orleans’s top “hot” band. Ory’s career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made.
In 1925 Edward “Kid” Ory moved to Chicago, where he made records with King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton that captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, “Muskrat Ramble,” is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career.With Creole Trombone, author John McCusker tells the story of a jazz musician arriving on the scene in New Orleans at the same time as the music itself. The man and the music came up together, reached maturity together and, ultimately, faded from the scene together.
The tale covers the years between 1900 and 1933 and that period is the book’s main focus. Kid Ory’s remembrances carry the story only to this point, and it would have been difficult to fill the remaining years without his voice. While the tale of his career revival in the forties is interesting, it is far less so than the earlier period and less relevant to the historical question:
“Who was Kid Ory?”
Noel Malcolm on Hobbes
Noel Malcolm’s monumental 2,355 page edition of Leviathan is rightly attracting attention well beyond philosophical circles. And you can read Malcolm’s chapter on Oakeshott’s Hobbes in the forthcoming A Companion to Michael Oakeshott.
But things are looking up for the Monster, thanks to the labours of Noel Malcolm, a polymath at All Souls College, Oxford, and a former journalist and commentator. In the 1990s Dr Malcolm transformed the study of Hobbes by assembling and annotating his surviving correspondence. Dr Malcolm seems to have read, and judiciously assessed, everything that may be relevant to everything that may be relevant (this includes graveyard inscriptions, so it can fairly be said that he leaves no stone unturned). He has now published the first fully critical edition of “Leviathan”, including the different, and shorter, Latin version, which Hobbes published some 17 years after the English text that anglophone students of politics study to this day. Anyone who wonders why Hobbes used the name of a biblical sea-beast that was traditionally identified with the devil to refer to the state, or commonwealth, “to which…we owe our peace and defence”, will find the obscure but likeliest solution to this puzzle, and others, uncovered here.
Radical Temporality and the Modern Moral Imagination: Two Themes in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott
Here is the “dean” of Oakeshott exposition, Tim Fuller, and a taster from his essay for the Companion.
My intention is to reflect on two themes that run through the whole of Oakeshott’s thought: first, the radical temporality of the human condition and, second, the character of modernity’s response to radical temporality. The first is, for Oakeshott, universal in experience to all times and places; the second is peculiar to a development in the modern West which, Oakeshott suggests, began to come into sight about five centuries ago, which persists into the present, and which manifests our particular experience of, and response as he understands it to, the universal condition of radical temporality. The second theme emerges as Oakeshott’s exploration of the distinctively modern response to the universal condition. My approach here prepares the way to expound a “philosophy of politics,” which Oakeshott has described as “an explanation or view of political life and activity from the standpoint of the totality of experience” (RPML 126).
Oakeshott in South Korea
Episteme 9.3
New issue now available featuring symposium on Christian List and Phillip Pettit.
HIGHER-ORDER EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES AND INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY
Allan Hazlett
RELIABILISM: HOLISTIC OR SIMPLE?
Jeffrey Dunn
GROUP AGENCY AND EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCY Aaron Dewitt
CONSTRUCTIVIST AND ECOLOGICAL MODELING OF GROUP RATIONALITY
Gerald Gaus
EPISTEMOLOGY IN GROUP AGENCY: SIX OBJECTIONS IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTH
Fabrizio Carrion
HOW TO BE A REDUNDANT REALIST
Kurt L. Sylvan
THE NORMATIVE STANDING OF GROUP AGENTS
Rachael Briggs
SYMPOSIUM ON GROUP AGENCY: REPLIES TO GAUS, CARIANI, SYLVAN, AND BRIGGS
Christian List and Philip Pettit
