Corey Abel

I examine Michael Oakeshott's theory of modes of experience in light of today's evolution debates and argue that in much of our current debate science and religion irrelevantly attack each other or, less commonly but still irrelevantly, seek out support from the other. An analysis of Oakeshott's idea of religion finds links between his early holistic theory of the state, his individualistic account of religious sensibility, and his theory of political, moral, and religious authority. Such analysis shows that a modern individualistic theory of the state need not be barrenly secular and suggests that a religious sensibility need not be translated into an overmastering desire to use state power to pursue moral or spiritual ends in politics. Finally, Oakeshott's vision of a civil conversation, as both a metaphor for Western civilization and as a quasi-ethical ideal, shows us how we might balance the recognition of diverse modal truths, the pursuit of singular religious or philosophic truth, and a free political order

This volume brings together a diverse range of perspectives reflecting the international appeal and multi-disciplinary interest that Oakeshott now attracts. The essays offer a variety of approaches to Oakeshott’s thought — testament to the abiding depth, originality, suggestiveness and complexity of his writings. The essays include contributions from well-known Oakeshott scholars along with ample representation from a new generation. As a collection these essays challenge Oakeshott’s reputation as merely a ‘critic of social planning’.Contributors include Josiah Lee Auspitz, Debra Candreva, Wendell John Coats Jr., Douglas DenUyl, George Feaver, Paul Franco, Richard Friedman, Timothy Fuller, Robert Grant, Eric S. Kos, Leslie Marsh, Kenneth Minogue, Terry Nardin, Keith Sutherland, Martyn Thompson and Gerhard Wolmarans.

"This collection of recent scholarship on the thought of Michael Oakeshott includes essays by distinguished and established authors as well as a fresh crop of younger talent, reflecting the sustained and ever growing interest in Oakeshott. Together, they address the meanings of Oakeshott's conservatism through the lenses of his ideas on religion, history, and tradition, and explore his relationships to philosophers ranging from Hume to Ryle, Cavell, and others. Befitting from the nuances of Oakeshott's conception, the collection assigns no single or final meaning to his conservatism, but finds in him a number of possibilities for thinking fruitfully about what conservatism might mean, when it is no longer considered as a doctrine, but as a disposition"--P. 4 of cover.

This essay presents a multifold argument on Oakeshott's aesthetics. First, his famous essay "The Voice of Poetry" deals more explicitly and thoroughly with art than is often acknowledged. Second, aesthetic experience is a competitor to philosophic insight in so far as it discloses the coherence of a world of ideas through its uniting form and content; yet "art" remains a mode. Third, the essay points out that the absence of history from any major role in Oakeshott's most important treatment of art is a puzzle worthy of consideration. It is argued that Oakeshott's exclusion of history is intimately related to his interest in art's non-temporality, specifically, the ability of art to create a fictive "world of the text" which includes representations of human action in time which are set apart from both history and practical human conduct.

Contrary to many "political" interpretations, of "Brave New World" and "1984" this paper stresses that the evil of totalitarian government is not simply in the presence of great and arbitrary power, but in the particular ways that such power erodes love and friendship, the bases of social life. The crisis represented by the destruction of all possibility of love and friendship is placed in the context of Dostoevsky's meditations on "The Grand Inquisitor," and reflections by noted political theorists on the character of modern politics

This essay explores Oakeshott's life-long engagement with the political thought of Aristotle. By examining unpublished notebooks from the 1920's and comparing them with Oakeshott's published writings we find that Oakeshott's critique of Rationalism, his account of skillful human conduct and practical judgment, and even his account of civil association owe remarkable debts to Aristotle. In particular, Aristotle's critique of Platonic and Spartan perfectionism, is strongly echoed in Oakeshott's contrast between civil and enterprise association.

This paper for the first time reveals Oakeshott' early interest in writing a work of Christian apology. This "apology" was conceived in accordance with Oakeshott's religious modernism. Since Oakeshott never completed a formal apology, the author explores some early essays in which parts of the apologetic project are reflected, and then goes on to race the religious themes present in many of Oakeshott's published work. In conclusion, it is suggested that Oakeshott maybe understood as offering a concept of civilization that may be called Christian, though he is far away from any attempt to articulate a doctrinal version of Christianity.

This dissertation explores the relationship between Oakeshott's concept of the will and his concept of authority. Together, these concepts constitute a rethinking of the grounds of liberal political association. My central focus is on the link between Oakeshott's view of human beings as experiencing beings and his ideas on moral, political and religious life as outgrowths of willful human conduct, where will is seen as an aspect of mind. ;The full exploration of Oakeshott's view of the moral life, including religion and politics, allows us to see the relationships between these realms of moral experience, and to see that for Oakeshott, the political is of great importance in that it provides a fixed authority without which the moral life would degenerate into an anarchy of conflicting opinions. Unlike many twentieth-century thinkers, Oakeshott is finely attuned to the political; yet he bypasses the more common concern with rights, equality, legal procedures, modes of representation, and other such topics, and goes to the more profound problem of what authority can mean in a civilization of willful, self-determining beings. ;Contingent, historically achieved practices are the context for human exploits in self-understanding. Practices contain implicit understandings of right and wrong not based upon demonstrable truths. Since we face theoretical uncertainty and historical contingency, neither moral consensus nor perfection can be achieved. Civil association remedies the problem of agreement by establishing an authority disjoined from considerations of moral perfection. Religion supplies the missing element on the other side, as the whole in which the partial efforts to achieve the good are resolved. ;The consolation of religion is activity guided by the apprehension of the perfection of a world of practical ideas. Philosophy, too, offers a consolation, but one in which the comfort comes from abandoning practical ways of thinking altogether. Oakeshott's philosophic skepticism at once undermines the attempt to secure moral belief on a rational foundation and invites us to see more clearly the currents of intelligibility within our traditions--which may be of no small benefit to sailors on a boundless sea

This paper presents a detailed analysis of Stoppard's "Hapgood," in order present two related arguments. First, due to the modal differences between science and human conduct, the play must relegate science to a secondary role, in spite of the apparent primacy of science as the engine of the play's theme and plot. Second, while the drama hinges on its presentation of a fictive world very much patterned after the world of human conduct, drawing on love, friendship, patriotism, and more, it neither reduces moral questions to scientific ones nor does it straightforwardly present any moral message at all, but instead gives us occasion for taking aesthetic delight, which, like science, is amoral, but unlike science, draws upon our understanding of human beings as free.