The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott Quotes

“The degeneration of conversation into monologue, dogmatic assertion, is barbarism.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“Conversation itself has rules, which is why the conversationalist who insists that others must speak his language is a boor. To have a voice of one's own is to acknowledge other voices.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“In Oakeshott's view, ideas like natural law, fundamental values, basic rights, and "justice as fairness" are detrimental to the rule of law: "more often than not they are the occasion of profitless dispute, and when invoked as the conditions of the obligation to observe the conditions prescribed by lex they positively pervert the association: they are the recipe for anarchy" (OH 16o).”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“The demand for moral uniformity is more often practical than theoretical,
a demand for moral certainty where none is possible. It is, for Oakeshott, an essentially religious demand, and although an individual agent can seek absolutely reliable guidance in faith, this is not an option that is available to the theorist.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“Who I am depends not only on what I believe but on the beliefs embedded in the practices of the various communities to which I belong and in terms of which I define my identity.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“practices are displayed only in performances: a practice is the trace, the residue, of its performances. Practices are not "stable compositions of easily recognized characteristics." They are nothing more than "footprints left behind by agents responding to their emergent situations, footprints which are only somewhat less evanescent than the transactions in which they emerged" (OHC ioo).”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“Empirical reality becomes nature when we view it with respect to its universal characteristics; it becomes history when we view it as particular and individual.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“No oak trees without acorns' may be a formally true proposition, but that this acorn did in fact produce this oak tree, there and then, is not a teleological necessity; it is a circumstantial occurrence" (OH 104-5). Because history is what happened, not what must have happened, there is no room in an authentic historical explanation for teleological causes.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“it is the historian's job to find coherence in the past, nothing in history can be regarded as accidental. For accident-mere chance or "fortune"-explains nothing, and a
past composed of accidents is as unhistorical as a past of necessary consequences.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“the issue in historical explanation is to explain the character and not the mere occurrence of events. A historical event is not an atomic, isolated, permanent thing but (as we have seen) an "identity" or "historical individual" constructed by the historian.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“Memoirs, as everyone knows, make bad history.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

“Memory is not history, even though memories may be among the evidence a historian examines in constructing a historical past.”
― Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott