Discount on Oakeshott Companion

a companion to michael oakeshott, companion to michael oakeshott, companion to oakeshott, conservatism, liberal education, liberalism, michael oakeshott, philosophy, philosophy and literature, philosophy of education, philosophy of history, philosophy of mind, philosophy of social science, political philosophy, religion

In anticipation of the publication date (October) Penn State University Press are offering a 20% discount off the cover price of A Companion to Michael Oakeshott – download form here.

Sketch this: extended mind and consciousness extension

distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism

This from PCS

Review of “Pops”

aesthetics, H. L. Mencken, jazz, Journal of Jazz Studies, music, oakeshott, Ricky Riccardi, satchmo, spontaneous order, Terry Teachout

Here’s a review from the very excellent Journal of Jazz Studies. Along with Teachout’s “Pops” I can also highly recommend Ricky Riccardi’s What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years since together one gets a fuller and more rounded picture of America’s greatest art form and greatest artist. Both Teachout and Riccardi are masterful in marshaling the research into a coherent story and both writers refute the prevailing tripe that “Pops” was an uncle Tom. I look forward to seeing the review in JJS of Riccardi’s work. Here is a nice discussion with the very versatile Teachout (also author of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken) – as a self-avowed political conservative it is interesting to hear Terry’s thoughts on the arts and ideology:

Aside from the pure aesthetic pleasure I get from Jazz the theoretical relevance of my interest is twofold:

(1) Sociologically speaking, Jazz as a spontaneous order;

(2) The conservational nature of the music itself.

These topics speak to my interest in emergent order (Hayek) and conversation (Oakeshott). But this is a project slowly fermenting with the hope that I can write once the decks are cleared.

The Extended Mind and Religious Thought Revisted

extended mind, externalism, Joel Krueger, Leonard Angel, Lynne Rudder Baker, mark rowlands, Matthew Day, situated cognition, teed rockwell

Here’s plug for a collection of EM papers from about three years ago

The Extended Mind by Mark Rowlands

Persons and the Extended-Mind Thesis by Lynne Rudder Baker

Minds, Intrinsic Properties, and Madhyamaka Buddhism by Teed Rockwell

Empathy and the Extended Mind by Joel W. Krueger

Quintuple Extension: Mind, Body, Humanism, Religion, Secularism by Leonard Angel

Constructing Religion without The Social: Durkheim, Latour, and Extended Cognition by Matthew Day

Stigmergy in Web 2.0

computational intelligence, computer science, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended mind, externalism, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

Here’s a recent paper.

Fiction and the brain

joshua landry, literature, philosophy and literature, plato

Here’s a recent article referring to Joshua Landy’s very interesting work. Check out his just released book How to Do Things with Fictions. This blurb alone is recommendation enough:

Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit. It reveals that authors are sometimes best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises designed to fortify specific mental capacities, from form-giving to equanimity, from reason to faith.

David Malet Armstrong

australian philosophy, conservatism, david armstrong, michael oakeshott, mind body

“David Armstrong has suggested (lightly) that the strong sunlight and harsh brown landscape of Australia force reality upon us.” Cited in Devitt’s Realism and Truth, p. x

It’s great to see that DMA is still with us, as is “Jack” Smart, both grandees of OZ philosophy. The number of top-notch philosophers that OZ has produced relative to the population size, is quite amazing. Names that spring to mind are Samuel Alexander, John Anderson, David Chalmers, C.A.J. Coady, Gregory Currie, Michael Devitt, John Finnis, Jim Franklin, Frank Jackson, John Mackie, John Passmore, Kim Sterelny, David Stove and more besides. Anyway back to DMA. I corresponded with him in 2000 about his professed admiration for Oakeshott. Knowing of my other interest in philosophy of mind he very kindly send me his The Mind-Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction (1999). Here is an interview with DMA covering his wide interests and briefly referencing his Oakeshott interest.

THE WEB-EXTENDED MIND

complexity, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, global brain, network theory, networks, neural networks, social connectionism, social epistemology, sociocognition, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

Well, this article was inevitable – first mentioned here). Francis Heylighen has been talking about this for a few years now as has myself in discussing Hayek, distributed cognition and co-evolved mind and sociality not to mention my ongoing interest in stigmergy which I argue is a species of EM.

Abstract: This article explores the notion of the Web-extended mind, which is the idea that the technological and informational elements of the Web can sometimes serve as part of the mechanistic substrate that realizes human mental states and processes. It is argued that while current forms of the Web may not be particularly suited to the realization of Web-extended minds, new forms of user interaction technology as well as new approaches to information representation do provide promising new opportunities for Web-based forms of cognitive extension. In addition, it is suggested that extended cognitive systems often rely on the emergence of social practices and conventions that shape how a technology is used. Web-extended minds may thus depend on forms of socio-technical co-evolution in which social forces and factors play just as important a role as do the processes of technology design and development.

Keywords: cognition, cognitive extension, cognitive technology, extended mind, Internet, linked data, Web science, World Wide Web.

Review of Paul Churchland’s latest

neural correlates, neural networks, neuron, neurophilosophy, paul churchland

Here’s a tough review of Paul’s latest outing Plato’s Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals.

A final striking fact about Churchland’s book is that it seems almost wholly divorced from empirical psychology. Remarkably, indeed, in a book that advances a theory of the mind that is supposed to be empirically supported, Churchland provides only around thirty scientific references, just a third of which date from the twenty-first century, and many of which are computational rather than experimental in nature. One would like to think that he chose to provide only a judicious selection so as not to overwhelm his audience with references. But since he ignores a great many results that appear inconsistent with his main theses, we fear that the paucity of references requires a different explanation. Indeed, Churchland ignores almost entirely the extensive work in developmental and experimental psychology, in neuroscience, and in studies of comparative cognition that have been conducted by cognitive scientists, especially over the last twenty years.