A Disposition of Delight

aesthetics, companion to michael oakeshott, conservatism, elizabeth corey, liberal education, liberalism, philosophy of history, philosophy of social science, poetry, political philosophy, rationalism, rationalism in politics, rationality

My chum and the new president of the Michael Oakeshott Association, Elizabeth Corey, has just had this article published in First Things. Since this article is by subscription, I will only post a couple of extracts that caught my eye. Elizabeth is an excellent scholar whose chapter entitled “The Religious Sensibility of Michael Oakeshott” will be appearing in Paul and my edited book A Companion to Michael Oakeshott – see here for the table of contents. Anyway, here are the two extracts from Elizabeth’s article:

This disposition of delight can be detected throughout Oakeshott’s corpus—in his notion of the poetic character of experience, his love of conversation, his fondness for all activities that might he pursued as ends in themselves: friendship, liberal learning, poetry, and fishing, among many others.

Oakeshott’s insight into the conservative disposition is actually quite simple. It is that in responding to the excesses of contemporary liberalism and progressivism, as well as to Rationalism when it appears among conservatives, we ought not to compete on Rationalist terms, as if yet another mission statement or manifesto or policy could save us. The work of conservatives is above all to identify, preserve, and enjoy, and in doing so rejuvenate, those good traditions and institutions that remain, especially those activities that may appear pointless and wasteful from the perspective of those who want only to maximize utility: the life-giving activities and pleasures of poetry, liberal learning, conversation, friendship, and love.

Seeing What You Mean

Alva Noë, brain science, cognition, cognitive science, Embedded, embodied cognition, embodiment, emotion, empathy, extended mind, externalism, neural correlates, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, situated cognition, speech

Brief Alva Noë article.

Knowledge Has Always Been Networked

constructing the world, constructivism, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Heidegger, internet, Marshall McLuhan, network theory, networks, social cognition, social connectionism, social constructivism, social epistemology, social facts, social networking, social ontology, social reality

Here is a rather scathing review of David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.

The renaissance of Marshall McLuhan in the era of the Web is disappointing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its rather dull obviousness. There is little surprise that the quotable, evidence-free, technology-obsessed Canadian English professor would thrive in a technology-obsessed era where pithy quotes about the deep meaning of digital devices too often stands in for evidence. McLuhan, of course, was the master theorist of the medium; beyond the over-used “medium is the message,” McLuhan’s major insight was to argue that socio-technological systems — such as the media — operate on a grand scale, largely independent of the day-to-day interest us mere mortals might have in their actual content. McLuhan’s primary flaw, on the other hand, was to decouple this understanding of socio-technical system from any relationship to economics, politics, or society. As leading communications theorist James Carey put it, “McLuhan sees the principal effect [of communication technology] as impacting sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions.”

German philosopher Martin Heidegger is less quoted in Silicon Valley than Marshall McLuhan, and not just because he was a Nazi. McLuhan and Heidegger are equally poor writers, but whereas McLuhan’s inscrutable prose has led to him being more read than he ought to be, unintelligibility has had the opposite outcome for Heidegger. A dazzlingly complex philosopher — probably the greatest of the 20th century — the most important aspect of Heidegger’s thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.

The New Theories of Moral Sentiments

adam smith, austrian economics, behavioral economics, Deirdre McCloskey, empathy, sympathy

Here is an article in the WSJ on Deirdre McCloskey. I had the honour and pleasure to meet Deirdre some 18 months ago at a conference on behavioral economics in San Diego. She was absolutely delightful. Everything you wanted to know about Deirdre but were afraid to ask . . . can be found here.

Nature, nurture and liberal values

conservatism, David Eagleman, evolution, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, Jesse Prinz, liberalism, moral philosophy, moral psychology, neural correlates, neurobiology, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, plasticity, political philosophy, roger scruton, Susan Greenfield

Roger Scruton weighs in on the nature/nurture debate via a threefold review. (Image another Steve Pyke portrait).

Andy Clark – “Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?”

Andy Clark, brain science, cognition, cognitive science, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind

I’ve just come across this article by Andy with a follow-up here.

Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input.

The neuroscience of happiness

happiness, neural correlates, neurobiology, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, shimon edelman

Here’s an interview with Shimon Edelman whose The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life has just been published.

Patricia Churchland

brain, brain science, cognitive science, consciousness, Eliminative Materialism, folk psychology, moral philosophy, moral psychology, neural correlates, neural networks, neurobiology, neuron, neurophilosophy, Neurophysics, neuroscience, patricia churchland, paul churchland, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science

Having missed Pat Churchland’s talk at NEI this past October, it was great that she was in town for a full week of speaking engagements not to mention interviews and other demands being made on her time (and she is supposedly retired!). It was a pleasure to meet her (finally!) having followed her work over the years, most notably her Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. I recall the outright hostility to this book when I very naively talked about it in a philosophy department.  I asked her if she recalled this hostility – and she did – but soldiered on regardless. The book obviously made an impression on me and hence its title appears as the tag line to this website.

Here is a collection of my Churchland related posts. The Science Network has a superb collection of podcasts featuring not only Pat, but the rest of the Churchland “dynasty” including of course her husband Paul and  their children Anne and Mark.