Art,Fame, and Commerce

In Praise of Commercial Culture. By Tyler Cowen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), ix?+?278 pp. $14.95 paper.

What Price Fame? By Tyler Cowen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 248 pp. $22.00 cloth.     

William James on a phenomenological psychology of immediate experience: the true foundation for a science of consciousness?

Throughout his career, William James defended personal consciousness. In his "Principles of Psychology" (1890), he declared that psychology is the scientific study of states of consciousness as such and that he intended to presume from the outset that the thinker was the thought. But while writing it, he had been investigating a dynamic psychology of the subconscious, which found a major place in his Gifford Lectures, published as "The Varieties of Religious Experience" in 1902. This was the clearest statement James was able to make before he died with regard to his developing tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism and radical empiricism, which essentially asked "Is a science of consciousness actually possible?" James's lineage in this regard, was inherited from an intuitive psychology of character formation that had been cast within a context of spiritual self-realization by the Swedenborgians and Transcendentalists of New England. Chief among these was his father, Henry James, Sr., and his godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, james was forced to square these ideas with the more rigorous scientific dictates of his day, which have endured to the present. As such, his ideas remain alive and vibrant, particularly among those arguing for the fusion of phenomenology, embodiment and cognitive neuroscience in the renewed search for a science of consciousness.     

Mapping narratives: the 1992 Los Angeles riots as a case study for narrative-based geovisualization

In this paper, I demonstrate that narrative-based geovisualization contributes to a broader understanding of complex social and inherently spatial phenomena, such as riots, when combined with other data. Past spatial scholarship on riots has analyzed point-distribution data representing damaged structures caused by fires and vandalism. Although this approach is insightful, the analysis of damaged structures engages with just one type of many other significant occurrences during a riot. Since riots are a result of human actions, I am interested in representing other significant occurrences through the eyewitness, on-the-ground accounts—or narratives—that reveal individual observations and experiences. Using the 1992 Los Angeles riots as a case study, I combine point-distribution data and narrative data as a complementary, multiple-methods approach to investigate human actions during riots.     

Intellectual voyages in the South seas

Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. xix + 180 pp. including bibliography and index. $22.50 cloth.