The Elusive Oakeshott

Here is a characteristically lucid piece by Ken Minogue on Oakeshott’s supposed conservatism. It should be noted that conservatism as Oakeshott understood it, is an anathema to “conservatism” understood in the American context. I take the view that these the terms are not at all helpful and are, for the most part, vulgarized. Oakeshott was merely an epistemological skeptic and had a “high” liberality as his central value. (By the way, I don’t view Minogue’s characterization of Hayek as a libertarian as particularly accurate, but that’s a side issue). Oakeshott understood that culture was necessarily dynamic: a culture that didn’t change or was frozen by a nostalgic foundationalism, was moribund.

P.S. Thanks to Gene Callahan for alerting me to Minogue’s piece.

The Extended Mind and Religious Thought

THE EXTENDED MIND AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT Zygon symposium (Volume 44 Issue 3 September 2009) is now available online. The lineup as follows:

MINDSCAPES AND LANDSCAPES: EXPLORING THE EXTENDED MIND (p 625-627)
Leslie Marsh

THE EXTENDED MIND (p 628-641)
Mark Rowlands

PERSONS AND THE EXTENDED-MIND THESIS (p 642-658)
Lynne Rudder Baker

MINDS, INTRINSIC PROPERTIES, AND MADHYAMAKA BUDDHISM (p 659-674)
Teed Rockwell

EMPATHY AND THE EXTENDED MIND (p 675-698)
Joel W. Krueger

QUINTUPLE EXTENSION: MIND, BODY, HUMANISM, RELIGION, SECULARISM (p 699-718)
Leonard Angel

CONSTRUCTING RELIGION WITHOUT THE SOCIAL: DURKHEIM, LATOUR, AND EXTENDED COGNITION (p 719-737)
Matthew Day

Rob Rupert’s Cognitive Systems and The Extended Mind

Earlier this year I trailed Rob Rupert’s new book. I now want to give a plug to a workshop that is going to be held to discuss this eagerly awaited book. I’ve commissioned a Critical Review for The Journal of Mind and Behavior to be written by the very able Colin Klein.

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Evidence and Law: Free Download

EUP have made available the complete special issue of EPISTEME Volume 5 Issue 3 on Evidence and Law as a free download.

Jerry Cohen dead

The formidable mind that is Jerry Cohen is no longer. I have his latest Rescuing Justice and Equality on the back-burner and am now more than ever motivated to get to it. GEM de Ste Croix tried valiantly to apply Jerry’s seminal Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence to his brilliant The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Update: Times On Line obituary. Another update: Jo Wolff, a student of Jerry’s, will be interviewed in an oral obituary.

EPISTEME 2010 – Edinburgh

The 2010 EPISTEME conference will be held in Edinburgh. The theme – Cognitive Ecology. Conference page and call for papers here. A stellar line up has already begun to take shape.

The Metaphysics of Mind

This past weekend I attended the Timothy Sprigge Memorial Conference (see link to obituary by Jane O’Grady who was in attendence). I met Sprigge in 1997 at the Bradley conference at Harris-Manchester College Oxford, a time when I was very interested in the idealists. Funny how philosophical changes come and go – Sprigge, ever the outsider, is now of interest to current philosophy of mind. Anyway, this conference brought together a very diverse group of theorists in the most congenial of environments and I was able to meet a few of my intellectual heroes.

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Leemon McHenry (California State University, Northridge)

Sprigge’s Ontology of Consciousness

Pierfrancesco Basile (University of Bern)

It must be true—but how can it be? Some Remarks on Panpsychism and Mental Composition

Alastair Hannay (University of Oslo)

The Space We Share: Phenomenology and Metaphysics

Jason Brown (New York University Medical Center)

What is a Mental State?

Galen Strawson (University of Reading)

Fundamental Singleness: How to Turn the 2nd Paralogism into a Valid Argument

Jaegwon Kim (Brown University)

Explaining Consciousness: From Emergentism to A Priori Physicalism

William Seager (University of Toronto)

Concessionary Dualism and Physicalism

Seager and Che

Brian P. McLaughlin (Rutgers University)

Consciousness, Identity, and Explanation

Fred Adams (University of Delaware)

Consciousness: Why and Where?

Fred

Geoffrey Madell (University of Edinburgh)

Substance Dualism: You Know it Makes Sense

Ken Aizawa (Centenary College of Louisiana)

How Consciousness Can Safely Emerge

Ken

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David Cockburn (University of East Anglia)

Doubts About “Consciousness”

Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh)

Locating the Conscious Mind

Andy

Howard Robinson (Central European University, Budapest)

Quality, Thought and Consciousness

Stephen Clark (University of Liverpool)

How to Become Unconscious

Eduard Marbach (University of Bern)

Is there a Metaphysics of Consciousness without a Phenomenology of Consciousness? Some thoughts derived from Husserl’s Philosophical Phenomenology

Brenda Almond (University of Hull)

Religious Consciousness: Revisiting the God of the Philosophers

Julian Kiverstein (University of Edinburgh)

The Metaphysics of Time Consciousness

James Giles (University of Guam)

The Metaphysics of Awareness in Taoist philosophy

Tim Crane (University College London)

Consciousness as Predicated of Human Beings

Tim

Barry Dainton (University of Liverpool)

Phenomenal Holism

Peter Simons (Trinity College Dublin)

Consciousness for Four-Dimensionalists

Peter

Computer Simulations in Social Epistemology

The latest issue of EPISTEME is now available – the theme is computer simulations – an topic that is seeing a great deal of growth. 

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