Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a deep insight and comprehension of the world of Art. Contents: What is Art? The Structure of Art Significance of Materials Used in Art Describing Art - Formal Analysis, Types, and Styles of Art Meaning in Art - Socio-Cultural Contexts, Symbolism, and Iconography Connecting Art to Our Lives Form in Architecture Art and Identity Art and Power Art and Ritual Life - Symbolism of Space and Ritual Objects, Mortality, and Immortality Art and Ethics
Symbol Use and Symbolic Representation: Developmental and Comparative Perspectives is the proceedings of a workshop held at Emory University in 2002 to discuss the difficult and age-old issue of what makes a symbol symbolic. The issue shifts towards exploring the relation between apparent symbolic behavior and actual symbolic insight on the part of the user or recipient. The workshop discussed the pitfalls of inferring symbolic understanding from apparently symbolic behaviors and possible criteria that would enable us to ascertain when a symbol is being employed in an intentional, communicative, representational manner. Broken down into three parts, this volume: *focuses on the factors that influence the emergence of symbolic behavior in young, typically developing children; *turns to an examination of individual and population differences in symbolic development and the ways variability in symbol use can inform the cognitive mechanisms underlying symbolic insight; and *explores symbolic understanding in non-human animals. The text ends with a synthesis of recurring themes, questions, concerns, and conclusions, and offers a new perspective on the process of understanding the relation between symbol use and symbolic insight.
Language is not simply a tool for communication - symbolic power struggles underlie any speech act, discourse move, or verbal interaction, be it in face-to-face conversations, online tweets or political debates. This book provides a clear and accessible introduction to the topic of language and power from an applied linguistics perspective. It is clearly split into three sections: the power of symbolic representation, the power of symbolic action and the power to create symbolic reality. It draws upon a wide range of existing work by philosophers, sociolinguists, sociologists and applied linguists, and includes current real-world examples, to provide a fresh insight into a topic that is of particular significance and interest in the current political climate and in our increasingly digital age. The book shows the workings of language as symbolic power in educational, social, cultural and political settings and discusses ways to respond to and even resist symbolic violence.
This gentle introduction to discrete mathematics is written for first and second year math majors, especially those who intend to teach. The text began as a set of lecture notes for the discrete mathematics course at the University of Northern Colorado. This course serves both as an introduction to topics in discrete math and as the "introduction to proof" course for math majors. The course is usually taught with a large amount of student inquiry, and this text is written to help facilitate this. Four main topics are covered: counting, sequences, logic, and graph theory. Along the way proofs are introduced, including proofs by contradiction, proofs by induction, and combinatorial proofs. The book contains over 360 exercises, including 230 with solutions and 130 more involved problems suitable for homework. There are also Investigate! activities throughout the text to support active, inquiry based learning. While there are many fine discrete math textbooks available, this text has the following advantages: It is written to be used in an inquiry rich course. It is written to be used in a course for future math teachers. It is open source, with low cost print editions and free electronic editions.
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. The major principles and systems of C. S. Peirce's ground-breaking theory of signs and signification are now generally well known. Less well known, however, is the fact that Peirce initially conceived these systems within a 'Philosophy of Representation', his latter-day version of the traditional grammar, logic and rhetoric trivium. In this book, Tony Jappy traces the evolution of Peirce's Philosophy of Representation project and examines the sign systems which came to supersede it. Surveying the stages in Peirce's break with this Philosophy of Representation from its beginnings in the mid-1860s to his final statements on signs between 1908 and 1911, this book draws out the essential theoretical differences between the earlier and later sign systems. Although the 1903 ten-class system has been extensively researched by scholars, this book is the first to exploit the untapped potential of the later six-element systems. Showing how these systems differ from the 1903 version, Peirce's Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation offers an innovative and valuable reinterpretation of Peirce's thinking on signs and representation. Exploring the potential of the later sign-systems that Peirce scholars have hitherto been reluctant to engage with and extending Peirce's semiotic theory beyond the much canvassed systems of his Philosophy of Representation, this book will be essential reading for everyone working in the field of semiotics.
"Archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger looks past the horses, bison, ibex, and faceless humans in the ancient paintings and instead focuses on the abstract geometric images that accompany them. She offers her research on the terse symbols that appear more often than any other kinds of figures--signs that have never really been studied or explained until now"--
How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic system that carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musical representation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competent listeners. Nussbaum identifies three modes of musical representation, describes the basis of extramusical meaning, and analyzes musical works as created historical entities (performances of which are tokens or replicas). In addition, he explains how music gives rise to emotions and evokes states of mind that are religious in character. Nussbaum's argument proceeds from biology, psychology, and philosophy to music--and occasionally from music back to biology, psychology, and philosophy. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history; relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which we are hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. The biology, psychology, and philosophy of musical representation, he argues, have something to tell us about what we are, based on what we have been.