Media semiotics is a valuable method of focusing on the hidden meanings within media texts. This new edition brings Understanding Media Semiotics fully up to date and is written for students of the media, of linguistics and those interested in studying the ever-changing media in more detail. Offering an in-depth guide to help students investigate and understand the media using semiotic theory, this book assumes little previous knowledge of semiotics or linguistics, avoiding jargon and explaining the issues step by step. With in-depth case studies, practical accounts and directed further reading, Understanding Media Semiotics provides students with all the tools they need to understand semiotic analysis in the context of the media. Semiotic analysis is sometimes seen as complicated and difficult to understand; Marcel Danesi shows that on the contrary it can be readily understood and can greatly enrich students' understanding of media texts, from print media right through to the internet and apps.

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings— beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us. At the same time, we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others—the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us—are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world? The artist and maverick thinker James Bridle draws on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange, and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being that make up the world, and that are essential for our survival. Includes illustrations

This revision of a well-loved text continues to embrace the confluence of person, environment, and occupation in mental health as its organizing theoretical model, emphasizing the lived experience of mental illness and recovery. Rely on this groundbreaking text to guide you through an evidence-based approach to helping clients with mental health disorders on their recovery journey by participating in meaningful occupations. Understand the recovery process for all areas of their lives—physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental—and know how to manage co-occurring conditions.

This book is meant to be disconcerting. It asks many more questions than it answers, but perhaps that is how philosophy should be, especially if the questions posed are capable of rousing interest in a topic and stimulating individual thought. It challenges, sometimes attacks, and even ridicules, various traditions and theoretical positions in the history of the philosophy of art, not for merely destructive or polemical purposes, but rather to encourage insightful readers to proceed beyond these positions in their own minds. Its arguments are not didactic and its conclusions are not dogmatic, but evocative and provisional, in the hope that its readers will confront them with a vigor at least equal to that with which these arguments and conclusions have already confronted the traditional opinions. Its general aims are (1) to try to answer the basic questions: "What is art?" and "What is good art?" and (2) to try to develop a unified theory of art, i.e., a theory which would embrace and be equally applicable to all types and media of art, from architecture to rock songs, from symphonies to sculpture, from Shakespeare to street graffiti. Toward this second aim, it examines the traditional concept of beauty and finds it incoherent, undefinable, philosophically unsatisfactory, and incapable of serving as the ground of any rigorous unified theory of art, because it cannot, without equivocation, be made equally applicable to all sorts of art. Thus, instead of beauty, it proposes the concept of power, which can be clearly and precisely defined and which is not only universally and univocally applicable, but also rich enough as a concept to be able to shed light on the whole idea of art. It is not a difficult book. It is written for people at all levels of erudition from college frosh to tenured professors. It does not aim primarily toward any level, and tries not to pander, but presents interpretations within the philosophy of art which should be both sufficiently original to provide grist for the professors' speculative mills and at the same time sufficiently lucid for beginning students to be able to grasp the main ideas. In short, the book aims to become both a course textbook and a work which will be discussed at scholarly conferences and written about in journal articles. At least with regard to this twofold aim, to be simultaneously intelligible to tyros and interesting to experts, and its consequent claim to a broad audience, it is akin to such works as John Dewey's Art as Experience, Robin Collingwood's The Principles of Art, or Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key.