Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 14

Rounded Globe

‘Ye Machine publishing‘ has now established  Rounded Globe, a non-profit organization dedicated to the production and dissemination of first rate high quality scholarship. Here is the ‘About’ blurb: Scholarly writing has become inaccessible. Highly specialized, narrowly focused, filled with jargon, bloated with theory; the massively overpriced articles and monographs that embody current work in the humanities are […]

Changing faces of Britain’s natives

Late-Victorian histories of the English began in the woods of Schleswig, before the migration to the British Isles. But around 1900 historians decided that English history proper should begin with the foundation of the modern state in the fourteenth century. What came before was deemed not only barbarous but insufficiently documented. The story of ancient […]

A general theory

What was the relationship between Rivers’ psychology and his ‘conversion’ to diffusionism? Was there a psychological correlate of his turn from evolutionary social theory to explanations of social change as the product of social contact? While these are real questions, our search for answers is likely to lead nowhere if we get too caught up […]

Peace & War: theories of the warrior class

In a recent post I explained Rivers’ ‘conversion’ from evolutionary to diffusionist models of social change. Before returning to psychology – and articulating a particular thesis about Cambridge moral science in my next post – I highlight some salient features of the two models by way of a concrete comparison. In this post I compare the […]

Concerning Hobbits

A few years back I stumbled upon a Hobbit hole. I chanced upon it in a lecture of 1900 by John Rhys, the first Oxford Professor of Celtic. Rhys was arguing that behind the divinities, demons, fairies and phantoms of Celtic folklore are dim memories of various peoples that once inhabited the British Isles. What […]

Meetings of People: W.H.R. Rivers & Diffusionism

Originally posted to the Grote Club. W.H.R. Rivers was a key figure in the development of both psychology and anthropology in early twentieth-century Cambridge. Consequently, much of what is distinctive in the development of one discipline in this period relates directly to the other. Nevertheless, the pivotal event in Rivers’ anthropological career – his ‘conversion to diffusionism’ around 1911 […]

Richard Rohlin on ‘King Sheave’

The following is a guest post by Richard W. Rohlin: I’ve been taking a close look at Tolkien’s ‘King Sheave’ poem (you can read the full text here). This poem has completely captivated my attention and I’ve come back to it several times over the course of the semester when I really should have been […]

Awesome Amgalant

Today I started to read what is looking like the perfect historical novel. It is called Amgalant and you can download the first part for free on the website of its author, Bryn Hammond. I read a lot of historical novels and most of them are more or less degrees of garbage. Some are very good. But Bryn Hammond […]

What they don’t teach you at college

Someone just said to me that “writing is hard”. This was an incorrect statement. Writing is easy; thinking is hard. Thinking is hard but it is very easy to fool ourselves and think thinking easy. When we think about something we are alone in our heads, in a private world. Nobody is there to call us out […]

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