Review of The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America.

Reviews the book, The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America by Louis Menand (2001). In this highly entertaining and readable history, Menand examines the lives and thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, members of an informal (and short-lived) discussion group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1872 that called itself the Metaphysical Club. Beginning with the Civil War and ending in 1919 with the Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Abrams, this insightful and thought-provoking book tells a story of the creation of the ideas and values that have shaped how Americans think and how we live. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Deep Structure of the Picturesque

The late Paul Coates was one of the first students at the Architectural Association (AA) in London to submit an international computation-based diploma, in 1969. Responsible for introducing a series of computational techniques, Coates was also the founder of the MSc in Computing and Design at the University of East London, and in 2002 the Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture (CECA). In this unpublished article from 2008, which has been prepared and rewritten for publication by Christian Derix , Coates recounts his pursuit of ‘the particle physics of architecture’ - geometric rules that inform both unplanned and planned human occupation of space.     

Displaced ‘Origins’: William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature

This essay analyses William Henry Fox Talbot's book of photographs The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), in which he discusses the role of the photograph as a document. By emphasizing the historical specificity of the book, this essay argues that it presents an undecided and reserved view with regard to the future of the photograph. The Pencil of Nature is neither embedded in the discourse of the mechanical and mass‐produced copy, nor is it embedded in the idea of the ‘authentic’ copy or index, as has been suggested in recent theories of photography. Instead, it reflects a specific form of Romantic historicism which emerged in the early nineteenth century as part of a shift in the organization of knowledge. Talbot's statements on the evidentiary status of the photograph are thus related to literary genres of writing, and, in particular, to Thomas Babington Macaulay's work, to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, and to Talbot's own philological and classical studies. In this context, the intelligibility of documents is a function of time, yet time is simultaneously a source of constant change and the intellectual ‘horizon’ within which things acquire their meaning. This, the writer contends, forms the discursive framework within which Talbot's views on the document are formed: on the one hand, the desire for ‘truth’, on the other hand, the recognition that time dismantles any claim for the universality of knowledge.