Joseph Epstein, still as sharp as a whistle, in The Weekly Standard. JE’s coinage “virtucrat” (“any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply, morally righteous in the bargain”) is the precursor to the term “virtue-signaling”, the condition befalling many academics, politicians and in all probability many…
Coming soon from Imprint Academic, edited by the very excellent Noel O’Sullivan. IdealismLiberalismMichael Oakeshottnoel o’sullivanPolitical philosophy
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…
A long anticipated reissue. A Guide to the ClassicsGuy Griffithhorse racingMichael OakeshottPeter OsborneSean Magee
Potentially interesting paper referencing Hayek and Oakeshott freely available in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal Friedrich Hayekherman melvilleMichael Oakeshottmoby-dickphilosophical literatureSpontaneous order
What with the “communisants” (the priesthood and their bureaucratic Stasi-like enforcers) in charge of the academy, Raymond Aron’s classic The Opium of the Intellectuals (the original English translation freely available here), still has resonance. (Want to know more about Aron? — a good place to start is here and here and I’d highly recommend Aron’s wonderfully lucid two-volume Main Currents of Sociological Thought).…
A promising new title from U of Penn with several references to Aristotle, Hume, Oakeshott, Hayek, Aron, Berlin and more besides. The business of a government [is] not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation. — Michael Oakeshott…
Recently published paper by David Imbroscio. Freely available here and here. city planningDavid ImbrosciJane JacobsMichael Oakeshottrationalism
The new issue of The Monist: “This special issue is motivated by the observation that conservatism plays a marginal role in contemporary philosophy even though it appears to be of considerable importance in moral, social, and political reality. One reason for this neglect is that defenders of conservatism have often refrained from articulating their arguments…
It astounds me that even some of the most well-read of people have no sense of who Rex Warner is. My introduction to Rex Warner was via his translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War some thirty years ago when I was studying the philosophy of history. Soon after I came to discover Rex Warner as novelist by…
manwithoutqualities 