Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss
Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss

Author: David McIlwain

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-03-14

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 3030133818

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This book compares the thought of Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss, bringing Oakeshott’s desire for a renaissance of poetic individuality into dialogue with Strauss’s recovery of the universality of philosophical enlightenment. Starting from the conventional understanding of these thinkers as important voices of twentieth-century conservatism, McIlwain traces their deeper and more radical commitments to the highpoints of human achievement and their shared concerns with the fate of traditional inheritances in modernity, the role and meaning of history, the intention and meaning of political philosophy, and the problem of politics and religion. The book culminates in an articulation of the positions of Oakeshott and Strauss as part of the quarrel of poetry and philosophy, revealing the ongoing implications of their thinking in terms of the profound spiritual and political questions raised by modern thinkers such as Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger and leading back to foundational figures of Western civilization including St. Augustine and Socrates.

Recasting Conservatism
Recasting Conservatism

Author: Robert Devigne

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1996-08-28

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780300068689

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Explores how conservative thought in the work of Oakeshott and Strauss and their followers responds to the postmodern loss of tradition, morality, and authority in contemporary British and American society. The work also compares each theory to previous political outlooks in both countries.

The Poetic Character of Human Activity
The Poetic Character of Human Activity

Author: Wendell John Coats

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2012-07-21

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 0739171623

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The Poetic Character of Human Activity is a collection of essays by two Oakeshott scholars, most of which explores the meaning of Oakeshott’s pregnant phrase, “the poetic character of human activity” by comparing and contrasting this idea with similar and opposing ones, in particular those of the Taoist thinker, Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), and his Western interpreter, A.C. Graham. Oakeshott’s deep appreciation of the poetic and non-instrumental character of human activity led him to develop an interest in the works of Zhuangzi and Confucius. Comparison of shared themes between Oakeshott and these two Chinese thinkers facilitates appreciation of his elegant analytic style and his resort to use of metaphors and story-telling when conveying some of his most profound insights. The collection also contains essays contrasting Oakeshott’s idea of the “creative” in human experience with views of, among others, Plato, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Oakeshott used the phrase “the poetic character of human activity” (arguably the animating center of his entire thought), to refer to the “creative” character of human experiential reality, that is, to the fact that the form (the how) and content (the what) of all human experience and activity arise simultaneously and fluidly, and can be separated only at the expense of theoretical coherence and practical skill. The various essays in this collection explore the meaning of this claim, and its ramifications for the proper role of critical intellect in especially philosophy, morality, learning, and governance. There is also some brief contrast of Oakeshott with John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Quentin Skinner.

Hobbes's Theory of Will
Hobbes's Theory of Will

Author: Jurgen Overhoff

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2000-02-22

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 146163735X

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In Hobbes's Theory of the Will, Jurgen Overhoff reveals the religious, ethical, and political consequences of Thomas Hobbes's doctrine of volition. The author gracefully describes how Hobbes's thought was governed by assumptions based firmly in Galilean natural philosophy and orthodox Protestant theology. Overhoff also demonstrates how his subject used materialist eschatology and an absolutist political theory to resolve the social and ethical predicaments that coincided with these assumptions. Finally, Overhoff provides a chronological study of the numerous philosophical, theological, religious and political aspects of Hobbes's idea of the will and situates Hobbes's doctrine within the context of the most important responses and objections put forward by his critics.

A Companion to Michael Oakeshott
A Companion to Michael Oakeshott

Author: Paul Franco

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-26

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0271060174

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Michael Oakeshott has long been recognized as one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century, but until now no single volume has been able to examine all the facets of his wide-ranging philosophy with sufficient depth, expertise, and authority. The essays collected here cover all aspects of Oakeshott’s thought, from his theory of knowledge and philosophies of history, religion, art, and education to his reflections on morality, politics, and law. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Corey Abel, David Boucher, Elizabeth Corey, Robert Devigne, Timothy Fuller, Steven Gerencser, Robert Grant, Noel Malcolm, Kenneth McIntyre, Kenneth Minogue, Noël O’Sullivan, Geoffrey Thomas, and Martyn Thompson.

Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy
Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy

Author: Aurel Kolnai

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780739100776

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We are currently witnessing an increasingly influential counterrevolution in political theory, evident in the dialectical return to classical political science pioneered most prominently by Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. In this context, the work of the relatively unknown Aurel Kolnai is of great importance. Kolnai was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century to place the restoration of common-sense evaluation and philosophical realism at the center of his philosophical and political itinerary. In this volume, Daniel J. Mahoney presents Kolnai's major writings in political philosophy, writings that explore - in ways that are diverse but complementary - Kolnai's critique of progressive or egalitarian democracy. The title essay contains Kolnai's fullest account of the limits of liberty understood as emancipation from traditional, natural, or divine restraints. 'The Utopian Mind, ' a pr, cis of Kolnai's critique of utopianism in a posthumous book of the same title, appears here for the first time. 'Conservative and Revolutionary Ethos, ' Kolnai's remarkable 1972 essay comparing conservative and revolutionary approaches to political life, appears for the first time in English translation. The volume also includes a critically sympathetic evaluation of Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics and an incisive criticism of Jacques Maritain's efforts to synthesize Christian orthodoxy and progressive politics. Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy is a searching critique of political utopianism, as well as a pathbreaking articulation of conservative constitutionalism as the true support for human liberty properly understood. It is a major contribution to Christian and conservative political reflection in our ti

The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott
The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott

Author: Efraim Podoksik

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-06-07

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0521147921

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A systematic and accessible presentation of the ideas of one of the leading British philosophers of the twentieth century.

The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism
The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism

Author: Matthew McManus

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-08-29

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 3030246825

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This book is designed as a timely analysis of the rise of post-modern conservatism in many Western countries across the globe. It provides a theoretical overview of post-modernism, why post-modern conservatism emerged, what distinguishes it from other variants of conservatism and differing political doctrines, and how post-modern conservatism governs in practice. First developing a unique genealogy of conservative thought, arguing that the historicist and irrationalist strains of conservatism were ripe for mutation into post-modern form under the right social and cultural conditions, then providing a new unique theoretical framework to describe the conditions for the emergence of post-modern conservatism, The Rise of Post-modern Conservatism applies its theoretical framework to a concrete analysis of the politics of the day. Ultimately, it aims to help us understand the emergence and rise of identity oriented alt right movements and their “populist” spokesmen particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Poland, and now Italy.

Michael Oakeshott as a Philosopher of the Creative
Michael Oakeshott as a Philosopher of the Creative

Author: Wendell John Coats Jr.

Publisher: Andrews UK Limited

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1788360109

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This book is a collection of eight (mostly) recent essays on the work of the 20th-century English philosophic essayist, Michael Oakeshott. Six of them advance the view in different ways that Oakeshott's multifarious lifework may be understood as variations on a singular insight — that the structure of experiential reality is 'creative' or 'poetic', with the form and content (the how and what) of thought and activity occurring simultaneously and conditioning one another reciprocally; and that this experiential structure has specifiable cultural, political and legal ramifications. In advancing and illustrating this viewpoint, comparisons and contrasts are drawn with medieval nominalism, philosophic idealism, Cartesianism, modernity, post-modernism, Chinese Daoism and with the views of thinkers such as Sir Henry Maine, Charles McIlwain, M.B. Foster, Leo Strauss, A.C. Graham, Friedrich Hayek, Efraim Podoksik, John Liddington, and others. Included also is an essay on the educational views of Oakeshott and A.N. Whitehead, and another on Oakeshott, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt and the relationship between politics and armed force. A very brief concluding postscript asserts the continued relevance (as a corrective) of Oakeshott's views on the creative structure of human experience in an age of ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI).