I have touched down in the Star Wars franchise on several occa-sions to illustrate a historical paradox I once dared name “Nazi Psychoanalysis.”1 Let me say right off that this study will not look more closely at the Star Wars movies.2 Instead, it will explore a terrain between the science fiction and fantasy genres that the success of George Lucas’s 1977 film illuminated and …
Presents the latest archaeological and historical research on all aspects of Maya society, from its earliest beginnings to the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century.
The human mind is capable of entertaining an astounding range of thoughts. These thoughts are composed of concepts or ideas, which are the building blocks of thoughts. This book is about where all of these concepts come from and the psychological structures that ultimately account for their acquisition. We argue that the debate over the origins of concepts, known as the rationalism-empiricism d…
It should be more widely appreciated that literature is a kind of scientific tool that can be used to shed light on consciousness. The argument is that the richest description of the phenomenon of human experience come from our finest writers, who are capable of capturing moments in time in exquisite detail from multiple perspectives. In this view, there is no …
Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction considers a subject that falls in the gap between arts and science, on the edges of which fascinating discoveries and important problems are found. Beginning with the oldest, ‘arts’ end of the subject, it moves chronologically through to the newest research — the ‘science’ aspects. Themes included are: the prehistory of languages and their common…
This Very Short Introduction answers four basic questions: what is Geography, how do geographers work, why is Geography important, and where is the discipline of Geography heading? Geography has always been important, though it has had only a short history as an academic discipline and is much misunderstood. Modern Geography has come a long way from its historical roots in exploring foreign lan…
This user-friendly book is aimed at helping students of Mandarin Chinese learn and remember Chinese characters. At last--there is a truly effective and enjoyable way to learn Chinese characters! This book helps students to learn and remember both the meanings and the pronunciations of over 800 characters. This otherwise daunting task is made easier by the use of techniques based on the psych…
At the same time, archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have begun to explore the deep-time origins and early development of social inequality, articulating trends and patterns through analysis of material attributes such as size and complexity of household dwellings, access to storage space and variation in quantity and type of grave goods, on the basis that the pervasiveness of inequ…