Simple, practical, down to earth tools to understand how life works and how to create the life you want. A blend of ancient wisdom and functional tools for today's world.

Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex. Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.

“Concept” in a historic and systematic perspective In his paper “What Happened to the Sense of a Concept-Word?”, Carlo Penco deals with the boundary between semantics and pragmatics and discusses some misunderstandings in the shift from the sense/reference distinction in Frege to the intension/extension distinction in semantics. Building on Fodor, Margolis and Laurence Jacob Beck defends in “Sense, Mentalese, and Ontology” the latter Fregean view on concepts by arguing that the mind-independence of Fregean senses renders them ontologically suspect in a way that mentalese symbols are not. Maria C. Amoretti explores the model of Davidson’s triangulation and its specific role in concept acquisition. In “A Critique of David Chalmers’ and Frank Jackson’s Account of Concepts” Ingo Brigandt suggests a more pragmatic approach to natural kind term meaning, arguing that the epistemic goal pursued by a term’s use is an additional semantic property. Agustin Vicente, Fernando Martinez-Manrique discuss whether this variability in the languages generates a corresponding variability in the conceptual structure of the speakers of those languages in “The Influence of Language on Conceptualization: Three Views”. The connection between “Views of Concepts and of Philosophy of Mind—From Representationalism to Contextualism” is explored by Sofia Miguens, in respect of Edmund Husserl to Jocelyn Benoist. Richard Manning argues some “Changes in View: Concepts in Experience” with the main thesis that the content of perceptual experience must be conceived as concept-involving. In “Concepts and Fat Plants” Marcello Frixione suggests that typicality effects are more plausibly the consequence of some “ecological constraints” acting on the mind. What does cognitive neuroscience contribute to our philosophical under-standing of concepts? That is the main question for Joseph B. McCaffrey in “Con-cepts in the Brain: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and Categorization”. The volume is completed by articles on the historical perspective on concept, starting with “Conceptual Distinctions and the Concept of Substance in Descartes” by Alan Nelson. “The Concept of Body in Hume’s Treatise” is examined by Miren Boehm. Lewis Powell argues the “Conceiving without Concepts: Reid vs. The Way of Ideas”. And Thomas Vinci asks: “Why the ‘Concept’ of Spaces is not a Concept for Kant”, while Sonja Schierbaum reconstructs “Ockham on Concepts of Beings”. Content and abstracts: www.protosociology.de

The concept of nanoarchitechtonics was introduced to describe the correct manipulation of nanoscale materials in the creation of nano-devices and applications. Nanoarchitectonics has begun to spread into many fields including nanostructured materials synthesis, supramolecular assembly, nanoscale structural fabrications, materials hybridizations, materials and structures for energy and environmental sciences, device and physical application, and bio- and medical applications. Following on from the 2012 title Manipulation of Nanoscale Materials, Concepts and Design of Materials Nanoarchitectonics covers the introductory features underlying the field, presenting a unifying overview of the theoretical aspects and emerging applications that are changing the capability to understand and design advanced functional materials. Edited by pioneers of the field, this book will appeal to researchers working in nanoscience, materials science, supramolecular chemistry, physical chemistry and organic chemistry, as well as graduate students in these areas.

Digital reference is a deceptively simple concept on its face: ""the incorporation of human expertise into the information system."" This lecture seeks to explore the question of how human expertise is incorporated into a variety of information systems, from libraries, to digital libraries, to information retrieval engines, to knowledge bases. What we learn through this endeavor, begun primarily in the library context, is that the models, methods, standards, and experiments in digital reference have wide applicability. We also catch a glimpse of an unfolding future in which ubiquitous computin.

Sports medicine continues to be a rapidly evolving field of study. The Sixth Edition of Concepts of Athletic Training focuses on the care and management of sport and activity related injuries while presenting key concepts in a comprehensive, logically sequential manner that will assist future professionals in making the correct decisions when confronted with an activity-related injury or illness in their scope of practice. Chapters have a good mixture of text, tables, and illustrations to make learning easy and fun and the material is presented in a fashion that is succinct yet provides the student with plenty of direction to get more in depth information as needed. Initial decisions and subsequent actions are critical in determining the outcome of a sports injury. This well established text addresses not only the concepts of athletic training to the student, but provides information that will assist the potential coach or other individuals involved in sports medicine.