yes, but, how will I make coffee with this 
Before coffee my intelligence is three points lower (let alone my communications, I am a real coffee zombie)
Aha! See, yesterday I signed up for GT2008, and today my FLGS called to tell me my copy of A&A was in. Coincidence? I think not.
Can somebody please enlight me? What is a FLGS?
Salvete
Widewitt
F riendly
L ocal
G ame
S tore.
Please return to your regularly scheduled discussion of theriacs.
-Ben.
Well my copy finally arrived today, which is abit ittirtating as I'm back to work this week...
Looks good so far.
Jarkman
Hmmm... I'm using a F-not-so-LGS in the very Tribunal of the GT2008 and I just got my paws on 3 post ordered A&As (and none of the shops in my own Tribunal carries it yet) - and for Yair or other people still missing: sorry but my players already deashed by to lift their copies.
Three word review based on shifting through the book: neat, very neat 
I'm about done reading the book. Lots of interesting stuff in there, I must say. There is a thriving intellectual life in Mythic Europe!
The whole chapter on Medicine quite reminded me of the perils of Harnmaster. I think my players will be glad their covenant has a medicus, an apothecary as well as various characters with a bit of Chirurgy. Anyone up for a little bloodletting? It's for your own good. 
I'm a bit surprised at how much money doctors make (a whole Typical income? Like a Covenant? Wow!) and not quite sure as to how apothecaries should keep track of their stores (I need to go back and read the section on what happens when you're short some Labour Points). And I still need to map the new disease severities to Maleficia guidelines.
The chapter on Philosophiae and, to a lesser extent, Artes Liberales should be required reading for every player. Mind and body work in ... interesting ways, to say the least. Although if anyone could clarify what imagination really is good for ("thought" doesn't really cut it for me), I'd be grateful. Is it suppose to 'embody' "what you are paying attention to"? The book list and the notes on what to do with non-academic books are both welcome (when asked what book they made a copy of at the end of their apprenticeship, one of my players answered "the Greek Anthology" ... Thanks a lot, how am I going to deal with that? Now I know.) Incidentally, are the specialties mentioned in the book list (e.g; Artes Liberales (rhetoric)) supposed to have any game effect, or are they only there to provide information on the actual topic of the book?
Experimental philosophy indeed proves not to be as horribly powerful as was feared above (thanks Mark for alleviating my fears), but you can still do quite a lot, if you're willing to invest the time, experience and money. You won't have it as easy as an ArM4 Natural Magician but, on the other hand, you don't need an oodle of virtues to create... GREEK FIRE! 
Though spending a whole season to create a stone that'll heat your bath water once seems to me like insane dedication to alchemy. Unless you only take a bath per season. 
I'm wondering, though, whether you can use a Formula without learning it first if you have the corresponding lab text. The example isn't clear about that. I'd assume not - same as for spells, lab texts and casting tablets, but I'd like to be sure.
I'm not too interested in the University setting, so I'll let someone else comment on that. Still, it's fascinating to see how much of it has been passed down to us.
Mythic Artists are intriguing. I think I'll have my players chase a legendary artist to recreate the broken non-Hermetic focus of their (thus) failing Magic aura, or something like that. Plenty of cool story seeds, by the way ("The Collection of Living Things", hehehe).
I'm sure I'll have more questions when everything starts sinking in, but right now I can feel the natural faculty rising to my brain so I'll just head off to bed. Fun fun fun.
No, that's a typical income like a craftsman - see City & Guild. The same labels are used, but the amount of money is different.
Think of it like video camera footage. You take the species stored in your common sense -- that is, things you have actually sensed -- and replay pictures. It covers the understanding of these pictures as well; the recognition of your old enemy Bob the demon, and so forth. It is also the process of actively thinking about things; because that video camera footage can be a live feed. (The common sense is the video camera itself, in this analogy; it records, assembles, and stores the data, but doesn't analyse it). Imagination doesn't employ the memory, which stores ideas rather than images. Thus the imagination cannot extrapolate what it is fed.
The cognition is very similar, but it uses the memory, and can employ things which have not been sensed. It is closer to the modern concept of the imagination as the home of fantasy, dreams, and planning. If the imagination is video camera footage, then the cognition is like a StarTrek holographic chamber. It can use the images from the common sense, meld them with ideas in the memory, chop and change them willy-nilly, and so forth.
Hope this helps,
Mark
So imagination would be responsible for having a tune stuck in your head, drawing a blank on what a person was wearing just ten minutes ago, or not realizing that, yes it really is a dragon right in front of you, although you might know everything there is to know about them, etc.
Regarding income, the numbers do match both in Covenants and City & Guild. I guess it just means that, yes, doctors are rich bastards.
Male secum agit aeger, medicum qui heredam facit - The sick man does himself no favour when he makes the doctor his heir.
I've said this on the Berklist but just thought I'd add it here.
The sidebars in Art & Academe are really good.
The fact that they are indexed/listed in a table is a godsend.
I'm still absorbing the rest of it and although I agree with the comment that it's a pretty full-on read and not for everyone, it's a great supplement.
I'm still getting my head around the whole Alchemy / Astrology / Medicine
section and how it meshes or contrasts with TMRE on these aspects but in effect the "Natural Magician" of ArM4 has been rebirthed here in true ArM5 style without being broken.
Kudos to Mark & Matt.
Lachie