Tag Archive Browsing Tag: anti-rationalism

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Joe Rogan

Peterson + Rogan: Dream Team

I’ve listened to pretty much all of Joe’s podcasts as I have to Jordan’s: independently they are superb but together they bring out the absolute best in each other. I didn’t think that anything could top their first meeting but they did exactly that in this their second. They are the instantiation of Oakeshott’s metaphor of conversation…

Daniel Kahneman

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed the World

Listen to Michael Lewis discuss his latest book on Freakonomics Radio: “The Men Who Started a Thinking Revolution” (skip to 1:50) and on Charlie Rose (much better than the former discussion); plus some print reviews in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the FT and The Economist. Below is a draft encyclopedia entry on Daniel Kahneman (and Amos…

Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi

Leopardi is quite possibly my favourite poet, this despite my reading him in English and being aware that quite a bit must be getting lost. Anyway, David Bentley Hart reviews Zibaldone published a few years back pointing out in his review Leopardi’s paradoxical cast of mind as does the always insightful John Gray (second and third quotes) He had a particular…

frank zappa

The Central Scrutinizers

Released on this day in ’79 Zappa’s target was, according to some sources, motivated by the banning of music in revolutionary Iran. The target we do know Zappa had in mind was the ascendancy of the fundamentalist Right of the ’80s and the idiotic PMRC proposal . . . but now the target is more appropriately applicable to the regressive…

sam harris

Complexity and Stupidity

Catching up on Sam Harris’ podcasts — this one is of particular interest. Sam’s guest, David Krakauer, I recall from taking the debut Santa Fe Institute freebie course a few years back run by the excellent Melanie Mitchell. Do check out the SFI’s free programmes, notably SFI’s Complexity Explorer: it beats many a fee-paying university course. In any event, if you…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Intellectual Yet Idiot

Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives the Platonic rationalist “elites” a mega bitch slap (Original source here). Supplemented by the recent lunacy as per below, I suspect that though philosophers (rightly so) got their knickers in a twist a couple of years ago when deGrasse Tyson slammed the value of philosophy, they’d be well on board with this…

adam smith, hume

The Avuncular David Hume

Hume is on my mind especially in regard to my current work on Adam Smith. To this end, I’ve been re-watching Bryan Magee’s series The Great Philosophers from ’87. I’ve especially enjoyed the Hume discussion with John Passmore. Magee is an expositor second to none despite the fact that his expert guests are more intimate with-…