There exists a world much like our own, one parallel to the spirit world. People much like ourselves fight every day to keep both worlds from plummeting into darkness. They are called defenders. The spirit realm is divided into many smaller worlds, like shards of a once-complete painting. They follow their own paths and are vastly different from one another. But time reveals that these worlds have a limited existence, one which appears to be running out. The mission of getting to the bottom of these lands is for a defender. Ryoku Dragontalen has only a matter of days to complete his goal. After a harrying encounter with the fearsome emperor of Orden, Ryoku must recuperate and gather his strength for a second and final showdown with the young emperor, Lars Ordenstraum, an encounter the entire spirit realm has been waiting for. Follow Ryoku Dragontalen once more on his mission to meet a looming deadline as he journeys through new worlds, meeting friends old and new, as he gathers his strength to face what the very gods fear.

Marx and the Moving Image approaches cinema from a Marxist perspective. It argues that the supposed 'end of history', marked by the comprehensive triumph of capitalism and the 'end of cinema', calls for revisiting Marx's writings in order to analyse film theories, histories and practices.

The Encyclopedia of American Philosophy provides coverage of the major figures, concepts, historical periods and traditions in American philosophical thought. Containing over 600 entries written by scholars who are experts in the field, this Encyclopedia is the first of its kind. It is a scholarly reference work that is accessible to the ordinary reader by explaining complex ideas in simple terms and providing ample cross-references to facilitate further study. The Encyclopedia of American Philosophy contains a thorough analytical index and will serve as a standard, comprehensive reference work for universities and colleges. Topics covered include: Great philosophers: Emerson, Dewey, James, Royce, Peirce, Santayana Subjects: Pragmatism, Progress, the Future, Knowledge, Democracy, Growth, Truth Influences on American Philosophy: Hegel, Aristotle, Plato, British Enlightenment, Reformation Self-Assessments: Joe Margolis, Donald Davidson, Susan Haack, Peter Hare, John McDermott, Stanley Cavell Ethics: Value, Pleasure, Happiness, Duty, Judgment, Growth Political Philosophy: Declaration of Independence, Democracy, Freedom, Liberalism, Community, Identity

"Reflections on the relationship between man and the Universe created in his image"

This Handbook introduces neurosemiotics, a pluralistic framework to reconsider semiosis as an emergent phenomenon at the interface of biology and culture. Across individual and interpersonal settings, meaning is influenced by external and internal processes bridging phenomenological and biological dimensions. Yet, each of these dyads has been segregated into discipline-specific topics, with attempts to chart their intersections proving preliminary at best. Bringing together perspectives from world-leading experts, this volume seeks to overcome these disciplinary divides between the social and the natural sciences at both the empirical and theoretical levels. Its various chapters chart the foundations of neurosemiotics; characterize linguistic and interpersonal dynamics as shaped by neurocognitive, bodily, situational, and societal factors; and examine other daily neurosemiotic occurrences driven by faces, music, tools, and even visceral signals. This comprehensive volume is a state-of the-art resource for students and researchers interested in how humans and other animals construe experience in such fields as cognitive neuroscience, biosemiotics, philosophy of mind, neuropsychology, neurolinguistics, and evolutionary biology.

Slave to the Body is the first comprehensive study of body-politics in the Old South. The book investigates how black and white, male and female bodies were defined and thereby brought into existence as distinct corporealities. The making and unmaking of Southern bodies took place in a variety of fields such as medicine, sexuality, religion, beauty, fashion, or sports - and it resulted in a hierarchy of corporeality in which blacks were much more embodied than whites, and in which white men and black women marked the opposite poles of this typology of embodiment. The dualism of black hyper-bodies and white no-bodies determined modes of social control. While whites were regulated in modern disembodied ways, slaves were controlled in pre-modern ways via the inflicted flesh. The despotic power whites exercised over blacks was inefficient in many ways, but reformatory experiments failed, because Southern whites were unable to think blacks differently. Images of black hyper-corporeality were so persuasive that white Southerners were incapable of creating less embodied, more efficient and more tolerable modes of control. In this sense, Southern whites were slaves to their own body-texts. Contents: Foucauldian Structuralism - Constitutive Effects of Power - Medical Body: Dissection, Display, Experimentation, Anesthesia - Sexual Body: Reproduction, Eroticism, Maternalism, Artificial Reproduction - Disciplined Body: Temperance, Anti-Dancing-Crusade, Sports - Religious Body: Sin, Salvation - Mirroring Body: Beauty, Fashion, Dandyism - Hierarchy of Embodiment - Function of Body-Texts - Regulative Effects of Power - Declining Importance of the Body - Penal Reform - Modern Bio-Politics - Pre-ModernDespotism - Inefficiency of Despotism - Economic and Social Costs of Subjugation - Threats of War - Breakdown of Despotism.