The Catholic concept of “sanctity” can be thought of as a “cultural unit” (Eco) composed of a wide variety of “grounds” (Peirce) or distinctive features. The figures of individual saints, i.e., tokens of sanctity, are characterized by a particular set of grounds, organized and represented in texts of different genres. This paper presents a semiotic study of texts seeking to offer an encompassing view of “sanctity” by listing all the saints and supplementing their names with a short description of their (...) lives emphasizing the grounds characterizing each of them. The analysis focuses on a seminal liturgical text, the Martyrologium Romanun (1584–2004), and the first official encyclopedia of saints, the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (1961–2013), as well as a sample of digital texts and media such as websites and mobile apps. While the first text offers a dogmatic perspective on sanctity and saintly figures and the second offers a historical and culturological one, websites succeed in reconciling the two paradigms into a single syncretic form of interactive fruition in which the more up-to-date encyclopedic model subsumes the traditional calendar one and, in the case of apps, adds a glocal dimension, enhancing situated cognition. The analysis shows that the introduction of the encyclopedic genre and subsequent proliferation of digital repertoires is connected to a shift in the Catholic “episteme” (Foucault) of sanctity and a growing tendency to consider saints as not (only) religious characters and objects of cult, but (also) as historical individuals and components of a culture and, consequently, as suitable objects of critical discourse. (shrink)

Perceived size is a function of viewing distance, retinal images size, and various contextual cues such as linear perspective and the size and location of neighboring objects. Recently, we demonstrated that illusion magnitudes of classic visual size illusions may be greatly enhanced or reduced by adding dynamic elements. Specifically, a dynamic version of the Ebbinghaus illusion (classically considered a “size contrast” illusion) led to a greatly enhanced illusory effect, whereas a dynamic version of the Corridor illusion (a “size constancy” illusion) (...) led to a greatly diminished illusory effect. Although these differences may arise from the different processes underlying these illusions (size contrast vs. size constancy), the dynamic variants we tested in our previous work also differed in the nature of the dynamic elements; specifically, whereas the Dynamic Ebbinghaus included a moving target and inducers that changed size and position, the Dynamic Corridor only included a moving target on a static background. Here, we explore further dynamic versions of the Ebbinghaus illusion and the Corridor and Ponzo illusions by separately manipulating three types of dynamic elements: target motion, context translation, and dynamic changes in context. Across five experiments examining 21 dynamic illusory configurations, adding target motion or a dynamically changing context separately resulted in little-to-no illusory effect. In contrast, the combination of target motion and a dynamically changing context led to a robust size illusion, consistent with an interactive effect. However, illusory effects that exceeded the matched classic, static illusory configuration were only observed for the dynamic versions of the Ebbinghaus illusion and the Revealed Ponzo illusions, in which the contextual elements changed size. We conclude that the combination of target motion and a dynamically changing context are necessary to produce dynamic size illusions, but that enhancement above and beyond static illusions may be largely specific to size contrast effects. Our results have important implications for the integration of motion signals, a ubiquitous environmental stimulus, in the perception of object size. (shrink)

Most authors who work with moral status automatically dismiss the possibility that plants are the kinds of entities that have moral status. This dismissal coheres with our intuitions about common-sense morality: if plants do not have moral status then we do not have any direct moral obligations to plant life. An implication of such a view is that any suggestion otherwise commits one to be in favour of an absurd conclusion. However, given the recent literature and empirical evidence on plant (...) minds, there are reasons to accept a different perspective that finds the absurd conclusion plausible. (shrink)

Although students of the fifth century A.D. have not been slow to recognize the merits of the ͉στορα Βυζαντιακ of Priscus, few efforts seem to have been made to under-stand this historian's methods of composition. The purpose of the present note is to indicate that the literary fashions of his time have exercised an unfortunate influence on at least one part of Priscus' work.

Translation of: Introduction áa la philosophie chrâetienne.

Rescher has presented a proof that a completed science is logically impossible; not every truth can be known. I show that the proof is valid only if it is read de re. One of its premises, however, is an obvious truth only on a de dicto reading; read de re it is false. What the proof shows, therefore, is that science has no limits and any true proposition can be known. We can, however, know it only in the meagre de (...) re, and not in the informationally rich de dicto, sense of 'know'. (shrink)

Epistemological issues associated with Cantorian set theory were at the center of the foundational debates from 1900 onward. Hermann Weyl, as a central actor, saw this as a smoldering crisis that burst into flames after World War I. The historian Herbert Mehrtens argued that this “foundations crisis” was part of a larger conflict that pitted moderns, led by David Hilbert, against various counter-moderns, who opposed the promotion of set theory and trends toward abstract theories. Among counter-moderns, L.E.J. Brouwer went a (...) step further by proposing new foundational principles based on his philosophy of intuitionism. Meanwhile, Felix Hausdorff emerged as a leading proponent of the new modern style. In this essay, I offer a reassessment of the foundations crisis that stresses the marginal importance of the various intellectual issues involved. Instead, I offer an interpretation that focuses on tensions within the German mathematical community that led to a dramatic power struggle for control of the journal Mathematische Annalen. (shrink)

Across a wide range of legal contexts, E. Thomas Sullivan and Richard S. Frase identify three basic ways that government measures and private remedies have been ...

‘Quid vero fit, quod poeta hanc plantam, tanquam munus locustae inprimis gratum, commemoret, nemo dixit; nee ego dicere possum’—so Jacobs in his note on the seventh line of this epigram. Among later commentators, Mackail thinks ‘can hardly mean “leek” here’ and he assumes it to be ‘groundsel’; Dain in the Budé edition is satisfied with the rather prosaic explanation that it is an ‘observation très juste … la cigale ne se nourrit que des sues des plantes’. I hope to show (...) that the diet of leeks and dewdrops from the mouth is promised by the love-sick swain of Meleager's poem for the same specific reason—to refresh the grasshopper's ‘voice’ for a new day's beguilement by song and persuasion to the sleep which will again free him from the cares of love. Although the ancients were aware of the means by which such insects produced their incessant sound, they remained faithful to the poetic tradition, which made them drink dew as a prelude to their singing, first found in Hesiod, Scut. 395, and clearly expressed in a couplet of Antipater of Thessalonica. (shrink)

This collection of new essays by eleven distinguished environmental philosophers addresses two main questions: first, whether environmental philosophy and ethics should be seen as a form of applied philosophy or as something else, perhaps best called practical philosophy; and second, how environmental philosophy is practiced in human life, especially in the lives of academics.

In the traditional frame of classical electrodynamics, a hydrogen atom would emit electromagnetic waves and thus constantly lose energy, resulting in the fall of the electron on the proton over a finite period of time. The corresponding results were derived under the assumption of the instantaneous interaction between the proton and the electron. In 2004, Raju published a paper where he removed the assumption of the instantaneous interaction and studied the role of a time delay in the classical hydrogen atom. (...) He introduced a model of this effect that can be solved analytically. He calculated the radius rsel of a selected orbit, for which this effect and the radiation reaction force would cancel each other with respect to the tangential acceleration. It turned out that rsel is by an order of magnitude smaller than the Bohr radius. In the present paper we use Raju’s model for the corresponding gravitational situation. In frames of Newton’s gravity, we calculate analytically the radius and the energy Esel of a selected orbit, for which the retardation effect and the radiation reaction force would cancel each other out with respect to the tangential acceleration. Then we compare our outcome with some results of Kaplan’s solution for the two-body gravitational problem based on the Schwarzschild’s field. We show that Esel is very close to the minimum energy of bound states obtained by Kaplan in Einstein’s gravity. We emphasize that the selected orbit from the present paper represents the second only physical situation where the radiation reaction force is zero, but the radiation-caused energy loss is not zero. (shrink)