Machine Vision by Simon J Cook
October, 2007
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
History of Political Economy, 2005
In nineteenth-century Britain a traditional, and ultimately ancient, political vocabulary of "pat... more In nineteenth-century Britain a traditional, and ultimately ancient, political vocabulary of "patriotic virtue" gave way to what is, as John Burrow notes, "the more ostensibly private" language of "independent character" (Collini, Winch, and Burrow 1983, 205). This transformation in the language of English political and social thought was in part the consequence of the decreasing importance of ancient republican ideals of government in the nineteenth century. In the wake of the American Revolution, a traditional opposition ideology of republicanism now appeared revolutionary, and from the first years of the nineteenth century the language of franchise reform replaced that of republican virtue. 1 But the eclipse of "patriotic virtue" by "independent character" can also be related to the appearance of new objects of social concern in the nineteenth century. The notion of "character" served well for a nation in which both economic industry and imperial hardiness increasingly came to rival political activity as the testing ground of personality.
Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Jan 1, 2005
In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resour... more In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resources in W. S. Jevons's attempt to construct a mechanical model of the mind, and both therefore played an important role in Jevons's attempted revolution in economic theory. In this same period both Boole and Babbage were studied within the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos, but the Cambridge reading of Boole and Babbage was much more circumspect. Implicitly following the division of the moral sciences into material and 'real' as established by the Rev. Grote, John Venn treated Boole's logic as a purely formal science, while Alfred Marshall based his psychological model of the mechanical part of the human mind upon Babbage's two-level machine. From the different perspectives of logic and psychology, Venn and Marshall did not simply incorporate their readings of Boole and Babbage, but also attempted to establish the limits to any mechanical explanation of the mind.
Elgar Companion to Alfred Marshall, 2006
British journal for the history of science, Jan 1, 2005
Elgar Companion to Alfred Marshall, 2006
While Marshall's conception of psychology can only be inferred from his economic writings, it may... more While Marshall's conception of psychology can only be inferred from his economic writings, it may be deduced directly from his four Grote Club papers, written in the late 1860s. The evidence of the former is consistent with the picture provided by the latter, and so it is with the content and context of these early philosophical papers that this chapter will be primarily concerned. This chapter will first sketch the development of Marshall's early thoughts on psychology, and then proceed to supplement this picture by reference to the wider history of psychology in late Victorian Britain. The later divergence of mainstream psychological thought from Marshall's earlier early model of the mind provides a possible explanation for why, in Marshall's economic writings, psychology tended to remain an implicit rather than an explicit model. Putting Marshall's study of psychology in this context further provides some clues as to why Marshall apparently drew from psychology lessons in economics that were so different from that of his contemporary, W. S. Jevons.
Written in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, this talk approaches John Maynard Keynes's... more Written in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, this talk approaches John Maynard Keynes's seminal thought on expectations by way of the faith of his teacher in economics, Alfred Marshall.
Marshall Studies Bulletin, 2010
Marshall Studies Bulletin, 2010
Political Economy by Simon J Cook
A contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall’s thinking during the early years of his... more A contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall’s thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshall’s thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development, in which he supplemented Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegel’s Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshall’s early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging reinterpretation of political economy as a whole. The book concludes with the suggestion that Marshall conceived of his mature economic science as but one part of a wider, neo-Hegelian social philosophy.
History of Economics Review, 2007
After his return to Cambridge in 1885 Alfred Marshall constructed an elaborate criticism of moder... more After his return to Cambridge in 1885 Alfred Marshall constructed an elaborate criticism of modern socialism and developed an alternative creed of economic chivalry. The paper interprets both criticism and alternative in light of Marshall’s early philosophical model of human character. In the first instance, such an interpretation reveals the modern economist as an ideal type possessed of both a warm heart and a cool head - an earlier generation of economists reasoned clearly but without heartfelt sympathy, while the modern socialist sacrifices scientific reasoning to generous but impetuous sentiment. But Marshall’s early model of character included a spiritual component in addition to a mechanical analysis of both reason and sympathy. In his mature reflections on socialism and chivalry this spiritual component translated into a ‘faith’ in social progress founded upon free competition and giving rise to a chivalrous ethos of self-sacrifice among public servants and members of the co-operative movement. But Marshall also developed a weaker form of chivalry, in which business men were to be motivated, not by the spirit of altruism but by a striving for sympathetic approval and an emotive desire to emulate honourable actions.
History of Political Economy, 2013
Developments internal to the study of history have played a significant if overlooked role in the... more Developments internal to the study of history have played a significant if overlooked role in the changing status of history within political economy. The paper illustrates this claim by way of a survey of the place of history within the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Alfred Marshall. It identifies a sea-change in historical thought after the French Revolution, such that Smith’s basic contrast of modern with ancient society was replaced in the thought of both Marx and Marshall by a contrast between the modern and the traditional, where the latter consisted of agrarian societies of one sort or another, distinguished according to their particular form of social bond and land ownership. But the discovery of human prehistory in the second half of the nineteenth century undermined the historical presuppositions shared by Marx and Marshall, leading both to revise not only their earlier historical accounts but also their conceptions of the relationship between the historical and the economic. While the discovery of prehistory can be seen as returning Smith’s ‘primitives’ to the historiographical stage it also played an important part in fostering the twentieth-century separation of economics from history.
Tabur, 2012
Economics has become a reductive science that postulates a utility-maximizing individual abstract... more Economics has become a reductive science that postulates a utility-maximizing individual abstracted from any and all social and cultural contexts. Today, both the friends and the enemies of this science agree in projecting this reductionism onto the history of mainstream economics. The present essay rescues the history of political economy from such standard reductionist histories. It does so by pointing out some of the profound and substantial roles played by ideas of culture within the writings of two acknowledged giants of the history of economics, Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The first part of the paper makes use of some recent revisionist intellectual history that situates Smith’s Wealth of Nations within his larger project of illuminating the historical, political, moral as well as economic dimensions of modern commercial society. The second part presents some of my own research on Marshall, and shows how his transformation of classical into neo-classical economics arose by way of an injection of a conception of culture into the body of classical economic theory.
Published in Marshall & Marshallians book (see below), 2011
Anthropology by Simon J Cook
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Machine Vision by Simon J Cook
Political Economy by Simon J Cook
Anthropology by Simon J Cook
Probably not.
But visit the Rounded Globe website to read this experiment for free; or pay some good money at Amazon. Your choice.
Here is the blurb.
In this essay the award winning intellectual historian, Simon J. Cook, explores Tolkien’s lifelong project of reconstructing the ancient traditions of the North – myths and legends once at the heart of English culture but forgotten after the Anglo-Saxon settlement of the British Isles. Cook situates The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings in relation to Edwardian scholarship on the prehistory of Northern Europe and the origin of the English nation. Taking us through three key stages of his creative writing, Cook shows how Tolkien crafted stories that fit – and illuminate – our fragmentary knowledge of ancient English traditions. By the end of his essay, Aragorn, Arwen, and Frodo appear in a new light – no longer just icons of modern fantasy, but also the original heroes of a lost English mythology.
Seven, for the halls of stone.