manwithoutqualities

Walker Percy, philosopher (4)

June 20, 2018walker percy

Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher.

Walker Percy, Phenomenology, and the Mystery of Language

by Carolyn Culbertson

In his theoretical essays on language, Walker Percy criticizes contemporary linguistics for overlooking the deep, existential impact that language acquisition has on human life. This acquisition, for Percy, radically transforms the human being’s mode of existence. With the acquisition of language, the world and our role in it change. The meaning of the world comes to be revealed through the ongoing life of human discourse: through books, conversations, philosophical inquiry, and so on. This chapter clarifies and elaborates on Percy’s critique by showing how it arises as a central insight in twentieth-century German phenomenology, particularly in the later work of Martin Heidegger and in the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger’s student, Hans-Georg Gadamer.

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CONSERVATISM: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

June 19, 2018roger scruton

Published today.

Adam Smith Age of Enlightenment Civil society Conservatism David Hume Edmund Burke freedom Friedrich Hayek John Locke John Stuart Mill Liberalism Milton Friedman morality property rights Roger Scruton the rule of law Thomas Hobbes

The Classical Liberal Case for Privacy in a World of Surveillance and Technological Change

June 19, 2018classical liberalism

Status: in-house

chris berg classical liberalism free speech privacy

Acquiring the rudiments of morality in child play

June 18, 2018Marc Champagne

Episode 15 of Marc’s series of podcasts. For an overview of Marc’s work see his website.

common law Jean Piaget Jordan Peterson Marc Champagne Moral psychology play rule following

The original version of Breadfan with a snippet of Winston Churchill’s famous acceptance speech included (subsequently deleted for copyright reasons). There is a dearth of good articles about Budgie but this is the best one I’ve come across.

Budgie’s fanatical grass-roots following was in total contrast to the slating they regularly suffered from the music press.

breadfan budgie heavy metal winston churchill

Adam Smith

June 16, 2018adam smith

Marking the birth of the gentle professor.

In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.

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Adam Smith David Hume distributed knowledge invisible hand Moral psychology political economy Propriety and Prosperity: New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith Spontaneous order Theory of Moral Sentiments Wealth of Nations

The Regulation of Language

June 15, 2018spontaneous order

Here’s a most interesting article that reemphasizes the functional beauty of the Anglophone tradition of common law and language. As Givati points out, English, be it “BBC standard” or Jamaican (and everything in between), is essentially of a distributed character. This is one of the reasons why English is so adaptable (science and business), so culturally rich, and as a consequence so closely associated with individual liberty. All this is lost on the various varieties of vulgar rationalist: i.e. those behind Bill C-16 in Canada (still in Canada, check out the fuckwittery of this); the euphemistic Newspeak impulse of the “religion of peace” dhimmis; and the new-fangled fundamentalism of the “cultural appropriation” squawkers. Their relentless flattening of the socio-cultural landscape inevitably embodies an authoritarian tendency — since they are pissing in the wind, how else could they effect policy? They will of course double down but they will eventually be hoisted by their own petard through their own takfir-like purity tests.

complexity cultural evolution distributed knowledge free speech Friedrich Hayek language liberality Liberty Spontaneous order Yehonatan Givati

Walker Percy, philosopher (3)

June 13, 2018walker percy

Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher.

Percy, Peirce, and Parsifal: Intuition’s Farther Shore

by Stephen Utz

Walker Percy’s unusual aspirations set his novels apart from most literary attempts to understand profound human problems. He gave meaning to the category of art as inquiry. In the novels, his characters’ eccentric quests treat everyday things as evidence for abstract and ultimately theological hypotheses. Outside the novels Percy shared their conviction, inspired by philosophical traditions that include Leibniz, Descartes, the British phenomenalists, C. S. Peirce, and Noam Chomsky. This article shows how well in tune he was with these traditions, and especially with Chomsky’s and Peirce’s variants on the thesis that built-in biases picked up from our environment are relevant to everyday and scientific learning. In this respect, Percy too anticipated the significance of more recent developments in cognitive science and robotic learning. Like Peirce, he also believed that these empirical learning patterns have theological resonance.

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