How Adam Smith would fix capitalism

adam smith

Jesse Norman in the FT. Look out for the forthcoming symposium on Jesse’s soon-to-be released book in C+T.

The real Adam Smith is a vastly wiser and more subtle thinker. He forces us to discard the usual simplistic slogans and tired clichés. But more than this: he still has a vast amount to teach us, not merely about economics and markets and trade, but about the deepest issues of inequality, culture and human society facing us today. Far from attacking Smith, we must turn to him again. For we cannot understand, or address, the problems of the modern world without him.

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Stigmergy in a water environment

stigmergy

This is the first time I’ve come across discussion of stigmergy in a fluid (water) context. Check out this freely available paper here.

Stigmergy is a biological phenomenon that has been adopted by robotics, referring to environmentally mediated communication where information about building actions is encoded in the partially built structure. For example, beavers build in response to the sound of moving water. This cue is directly tied to the function of a dam, which should stop water from moving. The simple linking of build actions to the function of the resulting structure results in adaptive and robust building behavior.

Cosmos + Taxis: Upcoming Symposia

cosmos & taxis

An exciting 18 months of symposia in the offing with top-notch contributors and with replies by each author. See the C+T website and FB page. In no particular order:

  • Mikayla Novak’s Inequality: An Entangled Political Economy Perspective — to be edited by Brendan Markey-Towler
  • Roger Scruton’s Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition — to be edited by Martin Beckstein
  • Roger Koppl’s Expert Failure — to be edited by Bill Butos
  • Jesse Norman’s Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why it Matters — to be edited by Gordon Graham
  • Brian Smith’s Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer — to be edited by Leslie Marsh

My favourite dive bar

alcohol

Which I guess means that it’s my all-time favourite bar. Here’s an excellent write-up in OffBeat on Snake And Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge.

I think what our strength is, is that we don’t have a demographic

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Walker Percy, Philosopher (5)

walker percy

Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher.

That Mystery Category “Fourthness” and Its Relationship to the Work of C. S. Peirce

by Stacey Ake

C. S. Peirce posits that the self is known only through negation—by the knower finding out that he or she is wrong. Even more importantly he considers a man to be nothing more than a sign. This is existentially inadequate. In this chapter, Stacey Ake shows the shortcomings of Peirce’s Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness in creating human identity by utilizing and developing Walker Percy’s notion of Fourthness in order to show that there is a positive way to create identity and, more importantly, community.

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Organisms and Personal Identity: Individuation and the Work of David Wiggins

david wiggins

Very pleased to come across this book on one of my favourite philosophers. Here too is Michael Ayers’ review.

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Chris Harris: master NOLA documenter

new orleans

It’s been long overdue but Chris now has representation with the top-notch A Gallery for Fine Photography. Not only has Chris had access to the “who’s who” of the NOLA arts scene (Clementine Hunter, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Thelma Toole, Professor Longhair) but Chris has shown me images not in the gallery (James Booker, Gatemouth, Charles Neville & Bros., a whole series shot in Angola). Of course, given Chris’ status he also documented out-of-town mega-names such as McCartney, Elton John, Steve Jobs and the like which I’ve had the privilege to view. Chris’ unintrusive (but not overly distant or hagiographical) modus operandi has served him well — his talk as “Walker Percy’s photographer” at a Walker Percy Weekend was fascinating.

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Walker Percy, philosopher (4)

walker 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

roger scruton

Published today.

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