Focusing on theories of verbal symbolism, Tzvetan Todorov here presents a history of semiotics. From an account of the semiotic doctrines embodied in the works of classical rhetoric to an exploration of representative modern concepts of the symbol found in ethnology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and poetics, Todorov examines the rich tradition of sign theory. In the course of his discussion Todorov treats the works of such writers as Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Condillac, Lessing, Diderot, Goethe, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Levy-Bruhl, Freud, Saussure, and Jakobson.

The Symbol Theory draws together three central themes. At the first level the book is concerned with symbols in relation to language, knowing and thinking. Secondly, Elias stresses that symbols are tangible sound-patterns of human communication. Finally, the book addresses theoretical issues about the ontological status of knowledge.

Anthropologists have always been concerned with the difference between traditional (or 'primitive') and scientific modes of thought and with the relationships between magic, religion and science. John Skorupski distinguishes two broadly opposed approaches to these problems: the 'intellectualist' regards primitive systems of thought and actions as cosmologies, comparable to scientific theory, which emerge and persist as attempts to control the natural world; the 'symbolist' regards them as essentially representative or expressive of the pattern of social relations in the culture in which they exist. Dr Skorupski considers in particular the notions of ritual, ceremony and symbol. He shows how their understanding involves and suggests more general philosophical problems of relativism, interpretation, translation, and the connections between belief and action. These are difficult and important problems and require an unusual combination of imagination and interdisciplinary exercise. This book is intended especially for philosophers, social anthropologists, social theorists and students of comparative religion.

Collection of 10 articles previously published on various aspects of ritual symbolism among the Ndembu of Zambia; p.83-4; brief mention of C.P. Mountford on Aboriginal colour symbolism; Primarly for use in cultural comparison.

Dylan is living on the streets, not through any choice of his own; he's been cut loose by his unstable mother, and lost most contact with his two younger brothers. Disturbing, gritty, painful, hopeful--this is a story of a 16-year-old determined to survive against all odds.

In this groundbreaking book, Andrei Pop presents a lucid reassessment of those writers and artists in the late nineteenth century whose work merits the adjective “symbolist.” For Pop, this term denotes an art that is self-conscious about its modes of making meaning and he argues that these symbolist practices, which sought to provide more direct access to the viewer by constant revision of its material means of meaning-making (brushstrokes on a canvas, words on a page), are crucial to understanding the genesis of modern art. The symbolists saw art not as a social revolution, but a revolution in sense and in how we conceptualize the world. At the same time, the concerns of symbolist painters and poets were shared to a remarkable degree by theoretical scientists of the period, especially by mathematicians and logicians who were dissatisfied with the strict empiricism dominant in their disciplines, and which made shared knowledge seem unattainable. A crisis of sense made art and science look for conceptual foundations underlying the diverging subjective responses and perceptions of individuals. Unlike other studies of this period, Pop’s focus is not on how individual artists may have absorbed bits of scientific theories, but rather on the philosophical questions that were relevant to both domains. The problem of subjectivity in particular, of what in one’s experience can and cannot be shared, was crucial to the possibility of collaboration within science and to the communication of artistic innovation. Pop’s brilliant close readings of the literary and visual practices of Manet and Mallarmé, of drawings by Ernst Mach, William James and Wittgenstein, of experiments with color by Bracquemond and Van Gogh, and of the philosophical systems of Frege and Russell add up to a startling but coherent picture of the symbolist heritage of modernity and its consequences.

This study reconstructs F.W.J. Schelling's philosophy of language based on a detailed reading of §73 of Schelling's lectures on the Philosophy of Art. Daniel Whistler argues that the concept of the symbol present in this lecture course, and elsewhere in Schelling's writings of the period, provides the key for a non-referential conception of language, where what matters is the intensity at which identity is produced. Such a reconstruction leads Whistler to a detailed analysis of Schelling's system of identity, his grand project of the years 1801 to 1805, which has been continually neglected by contemporary scholarship. In particular, Whistler recovers the concepts of quantitative differentiation and construction as central to Schelling's project of the period. This reconstruction also leads to an original reading of the origins of the concept of the symbol in German thought: there is not one 'romantic symbol', but a whole plethora of experiments in theorising symbolism taking place at the turn of the nineteenth century. At stake, then, is Schelling as a philosopher of language, Schelling as a systematiser of identity, and Schelling as a theorist of the symbol.