Michael Oakeshott as a Philosopher of the creative

<p>This book is a collection of eight (mostly) recent essays on the work of the twentieth-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 <em>how</em> and <em>what</em>) 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 <em>and</em> 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).</p>