Coming soon – a must have for any “Pops” fan. This release has been co-produced and with liner notes by none other than the author of the terrific biography What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years. Bravo Ricky!
Preservation Hall @ 50
We are indebted to Sandra and Allan Jaffe and Larry Borenstein.
Michael Oakeshott on the History of Political Thought
Martyn Thompson’s contribution to the Companion:
My concern is twofold. First, I shall outline what I take Oakeshott to have meant by the phrase “the history of political thought” and then I shall consider some criticisms from Oakeshott’s perspective of the theory and practice of Quentin Skinner, the leading figure in the so-called Cambridge School of historians of political thought. Oakeshott was impressed by his work. But there are significant points of disagreement. I shall focus on two: first, Oakeshott’s disagreement with Skinner about the historical interpretation of Hobbes’s Leviathan; and second, more generally, Oakeshott’s objections to Skinner’s reduction of the history of political thought to “the history of ideologies.” The two points are closely connected.
The Man Who Ate New Orleans
Now why didn’t I think of this as the premise to a documentary? So, I’ll do it without the cameras around. Up to 722 stops already and as the Rev. Ray Cannata says in the video “Life flows from the table. NOLA is both heaven and hell – the former something to enjoy, the latter something to fix.”
Hayek in China
This from The Economist and again here:
In the past year, the spirits of Keynes and Hayek have done battle for the minds of China’s policymakers. This month Andrew Batson of GK Dragonomics, a research consultancy in Beijing, argued that Hayek seems to be winning.
First Impressions
The new companion has landed in my mailbox. A fine production and my congrat to you and Paul for your efforts in bringing it to press. In an earlier message, you said there would be some surprises here, or words to that effect. Wow! What a stunner from Robert Grant! I think most of us knew that Oakeshott got around a bit, but not in quite such sustained Casanovian fashion! Those who think the output of creative people is based on the sublimation of sexual activity have just taken a bit of a shot in the nose! One does wonder, however, how MO had time for all this given the discipline needed for his reading and writing! I was reminded of Rilke in many ways, on reading Grant’s account, for there was so much going on in Rilke’s mind, that he, too, found it difficult to maintain any close domestic relationship, for he could not separate himself properly from the other. He too, was in love with love. Oakeshott studies will never be quite the same again. Shall read the rest of the papers with interest.
Best wishes
Graham MacDonald
Parksville, BC.
On The Future Of Jazz Among Black Folk
Discussion from NPR jazz blog
Substituting the Senses
Check out this essay forthcoming from the power team of Clark, Kilverstein and Farina.
Sensory substitution devices are a type of sensory prosthesis that (typically) convert visual stimuli transduced by a camera into tactile or auditory stimulation. They are designed to be used by people with impaired vision so that they can recover some of the functions normally subserved by vision. In this chapter we will consider what philosophers might learn about the nature of the senses from the neuroscience of sensory substitution. We will show how sensory substitution devices work by exploiting the cross-modal plasticity of sensory cortex: the ability of sensory cortex to pick up some types of information about the external environment irrespective of the nature of the sensory inputs it is processing. We explore the implications of cross-modal plasticity for theories of the senses that attempt to make distinctions between the senses on the basis of neurobiology.
Oakeshott and Hobbes
Here is a trailer from possibly the greatest living Hobbes scholar – Noel Malcolm – who we were lucky enough to nab for our Companion.
Even those who know only a little about Michael Oakeshott know that he had a strong and abiding interest in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. His edition of Leviathan (1946) became the standard edition for several generations of students, and his substantial Introduction to that volume, which was reissued in a revised version in 1975, remains one of the classic texts of modern Hobbes interpretation. Oakeshott’s special interest in Hobbes had developed more than a decade before the appearance of that edition; his first publication devoted to Hobbes was a long essay in the literary-critical magazine Scrutiny in 1935, in which he surveyed a range of recent publications on Hobbes’s political thought and emphasized that the old caricature of Hobbes as a philosopher of “despotism” was now completely untenable (CPJ 110-21). In 1937 Oakeshott returned to this subject with a review of another book, a study of Hobbes’s political philosophy by Leo Strauss; here he agreed with Strauss that Hobbes’s political thought was not grounded on a crudely “naturalistic” kind of science, while disagreeing with Strauss’s attempt to derive it from a set of purely moral assumptions. After the Introduction to Leviathan, Oakeshott wrote another lengthy exploration of Hobbes’s moral theory (with an “appendix” on his theory of the formation of the state), an essay entitled “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” published in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962). With the exception of the Scrutiny article, these items were gathered (together with a short essay, originally a radio talk, entitled “Leviathan: a Myth,” which 304 Oakeshott described as “a conversation piece, a flight of fancy”) in a volume published under the title Hobbes on Civil Association in 1975. And from the same period (1974) dates also a substantial book review, of a monograph on Hobbes by Thomas Spragens, which was later reprinted under the title “Logos and Telos” in the expanded edition of Rationalism in Politics; here Oakeshott once again challenged the idea that Hobbes’s philosophy was simply modeled on natural science, emphasizing that it explored, rather, a world of human intentions and human meanings. In every one of these texts it is evident that Oakeshott wrote about Hobbes not merely as a historian of ideas, but as a philosopher who found, in Hobbes’s central arguments, something valid and philosophically important.
The science of conducting
An interesting article from The Economist:
Determining a conductor’s influence is tricky. Does a “good” conductor wangle bravura performances from his players, or simply preside over a self-organising virtuoso ensemble? To find out, Dr D’Ausilio watched two (anonymous) conductors leading five excerpts from Mozart’s symphony number 40 played by eight violinists from the Città di Ferrara orchestra.
The findings are in harmony with what conductors knew all along: that baton-toting despots, like the late Herbert von Karajan, do add value—but only if they rein in the uppity musicians in front of them.
