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Adam Smith @ Edinburgh’s Fringe

Adam Smith Le Grand Tour (H/T to Gavin Kennedy for this, who by the way is contributing to my edited Propriety and Prosperity). Adam Smithinvisible handLiberalismSocial SciencesSpontaneous orderTheory of Moral SentimentsWealth of Nations

Adam Smith’s Pluralism: Rationality, Education, and the Moral Sentiments

Keep an eye out for this forthcoming book by the very excellent Smith scholar Jack Weinstein who also happens to be contributing to Propriety and Prosperity: New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith. Adam SmithEconomicsJack Russell WeinsteinJack WeinsteinLiberalismLibertarianismPhilosophyPhilosophy of EducationpluralismrationalityScottish EnlightenmentTheory of Moral SentimentWealth of Nations

Getting to the Hayekian Network

Extracts from Troy’s paper: In many ways this paper is necessarily an introduction. I want to introduce away to understand F. A. Hayek’s ideas on both spontaneous orders and the brain by understanding network structures. More, I want to distinguish between networks that emerge top-down in organizations and cellular regulatory networks and those that emerge…

Minds, Models and Milieux

Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centenary of Herbert Simon’s Birth Edited by Roger Frantz (San Diego State University) and Leslie Marsh (University of British Columbia) Call for Papers Herbert Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was a polymath of the highest order, making significant contributions to sociology, political science, behavioral economics, epistemology, cognitive…

Hayek in Today’s Cognitive Neuroscience

My chum, the extraordinarily distinguished and generous neuroscientist Joaquín Fuster, has this excerpt from his essay: In bold characters I mark the concepts advanced by Hayek in his The Sensory Order. In parentheses, under each conclusion, the text passages are noted in which he makes reference to those concepts: 1. The cognitive code is a relational…

New Translation of Lichtenberg

Here is a new translation of Lichtenberg’s work. As some will know I’m a great admirer of Lichtenberg and his equally endearing contemporary Adam Smith. I had the great privilege of meeting Reg Hollingdale who was a translator of Lichtenberg. If you are looking for a great commuting read, something that is accessible (i.e. aphoristic),…

The Morphology of Liberalism

Here’s a book review in The Economist looking at the morphology in meaning attached to (neo)liberalism. Here is the publisher’s blurb. But the line between Smith and Friedman is not a straight one, as Mr Stedman Jones points out. Smith thought one of the state’s jobs should be to build public works and forge institutions…

Smith on the death of Hume

Letter from Adam Smith, LL.D. to William Strachan, Esq. Kirkaldy, Fifeshire, Nov. 9, 1776. DEAR SIR,— It is with a real, though a very melancholy pleasure, that I sit down to give some account of the behavior of our late excellent friend, Mr. Hume, during his last illness. Though, in his own judgment, his disease…