Worlds Full Of Signs

Worlds Full of Signs compares Greek divination to divinatory practices in Neo-Assyrian Mesopotamia and Republican Rome. It argues that the character of Greek divination differed fundamentally from that of the two comparanda. Ample attention is given to background and method at first. Subsequent chapters discuss the divinatory elements – sign, homo divinans, and text, relating divination to time and uncertainty. This book brings together sources originating from various times and places, questioning these to consider both generalities of ancient divination and specifics of Greek divination. Greek divination was inherently flexible on many levels: these findings should be connected to Greek views on time and the future as well as the relatively low level of divinatory institutionalization.

This informative and engaging illustrated reference provides the stories behind 1,001 signs and symbols, from ancient hieroglyphs to modern-day political and subculture symbols. What in the world does Ω mean? And what about its meaning might have led my coffee date to tattoo it on his entire forearm? Where did the symbol ∞ originate, and what was its first meaning? How did the ampersand symbol & come about and how was it applied daily in book publishing? And what is the full story behind that staring eye on top of the pyramid on our American dollar bill? This comprehensive guide to signs and symbols explains. Find within: More than 1,000 illustrations An extensive collection of written and cultural symbols, including animals, instruments, stones, shapes, numbers, colors, plants, food, parts of the body, religious and astrological symbols, emojis, and gestures Historical facts culled from a wide variety of sources Learn all about the signs and symbols that surround us and their part in our rich world history.

Introduces children to many of the signs visible in today's world.

"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"--

A sweeping new theory of world literature through a study of Palestinian and Israeli literature from the 1940s to the present. Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs charts the aesthetic and political formation of neoliberalism and globalisation in Israeli and Palestinian literature from the 1940s to the present. By tracking literature’s move from making worlds to reading signs, Cohen Lustig proposes a new way to read and theorise our global contemporary. Cohen Lustig argues that the period of Israeli statism and its counterpart of Palestinian statelessness produced works that sought to make and create whole worlds and social time, from the creation of the new state of Israel to preserving collective visions of Palestinian statehood. During the period of neoliberalism, after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, literature turned to the reading of signs, where politics and history are now rearticulated through the private lives of individual subjects. Here characters do not make social time but live within it and inquire after its missing origin. Cohen Lustig argues for new ways to track the subjectivities and aesthetics produced by larger shifts in production. In so doing, he proposes a new model to understand the historical development of Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as world literature in our contemporary moment. With a preface from Fredric Jameson.

The book covers almost the whole range of semiotics: the conceptions of meaning, the appearance of meaning units in semiosis, the dichotomy analyticity/syntheticity, the formal condition of good translation, the metaphorical change in fine arts, the figurativeness in modern literary theories, the metaphor in computer translation, the conditionals with egocentric predicates, the evolution of the notion of cause, the temporal relation in conditionals, the structure of passive voice, the semantics of to think, the reasoning and rationality, the non-formalized reasoning, the operation of acceptance, the principle of non-contradiction, the relation semiotics/logic/philosophy, the interdisciplinarity and exactness, the notion of imprecision, the interpretation of some semiotic notions (i.a. semantic field of terms) in terms of mathematics, the description of categorial grammars in terms of model theory, the human knowledge as moral problem, the conceptualization of the development of knowledge by means of the notion of meme, the cultural relations between some European countries, the typology of scientists, the semiotic studies of some Spanish, Irish, Czech, Polish and Norwegian works of literature, the semiotic aspects of music, television and the whole sphere of artifacts, the history of semiotics (Plato, Gonsung Long, Descartes, Fu Yen, Peirce, Brwal, Lotman, Langer).

'A thoughtful exploration of humanity ... Fabes is great company and makes riding bicycles seem like the best way to see and understand the world' - Guardian They say that being a good doctor boils down to just four things: Shut up, listen, know something, care. The same could be said for life on the road, too. When Stephen Fabes left his job as a junior doctor and set out to cycle around the world, frontline medicine quickly faded from his mind. Of more pressing concern were the daily challenges of life as an unfit rider on an overloaded bike, helplessly in thrall to pastries. But leaving medicine behind is not as easy as it seems. As he roves continents, he finds people whose health has suffered through exile, stigma or circumstance, and others, whose lives have been saved through kindness and community. After encountering a frozen body of a monk in the Himalayas, he is drawn ever more to healthcare at the margins of the world, to crumbling sanitoriums and refugee camps, to city dumps and war-torn hospital wards. And as he learns the value of listening to lives - not just solving diagnostic puzzles - Stephen challenges us to see care for the sick as a duty born of our humanity, and our compassion.

Describes graphic signs and symbols and their importance to communication, from picture writing by cavemen to today's use of numbers, musical notes, religious signs, trademarks, signs in science and industry, trail markers and traffic signals, and the potentials of international sign writing.