In “An introduction to phytosemiotics”, a masterwork of integration, Kalevi Kull defended Martin Krampen’s notion of phytosemiotics. In doing so, he developed the notion of vegetative semiosis. In a later work, he argued that vegetative semiosis is not a branch of semiotics, and so should not be identified with phytosemiotics. Rather, vegetative semiosis is a basic form of semiosis and the condition for animal semiosis, which in turn is the condition for cultural semiosis. All multi-celled organisms, including plants, animals (...) and humans, are characterized by vegetative semiosis. While clearly influenced by Aristotle (and Thomas Aquinas), this characterization of vegetative semiosis makes it easier to relate biosemiotics to current science, to integrate current science into biosemiotics, and thereby to greatly expand the research potential of biosemiotics. (shrink)

This essay examines French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985) for their critical invocation of the persistent and patriarchal association of women with plants. Both women and plants are thought within the metaphysical tradition to have a deficient or negative relation to freedom. Varda’s films, however, link the liberation of women in postwar France to the liberation of vegetal being; her female protagonists pursue their liberation by accessing the vegetal freedom that subtends human freedom. In (...) Le Bonheur, Varda uses visual irony to critique the processes of idealization that turn both women and flowers into signifiers of ideal beauty in thrall to the enchantments of happiness. In Vagabond, the enigmatic female drifter at the center of the film enacts a plant-like refusal of self-preservation. In both films, female liberation takes vegetal shape, as their protagonists embody a vegetal silence or vegetal indifference in defiance of the patriarchal situations they encounter. (shrink)

In her Introduction, Tymieniecka states the core theme of the present book sharply: Is culture an excess of nature's prodigious expansiveness - an excess which might turn out to be dangerous for nature itself if it goes too far - or is culture a 'natural', congenial prolongation of nature-life? If the latter, then culture is assimilated into nature and thus would lose its claim to autonomy: its criteria would be superseded by those of nature alone. Of course, nature and (...) culture may both still be seen as being absorbed by the inner powers of specifically human inwardness, on which view, human being, caught in its own transcendence, becomes separated radically in kind from the rest of existence and may not touch even the shadow of reality except through its own prism. Excess, therefore, or prolongation? And on what terms? The relationship between culture and nature in its technical phase demands a new elucidation. Here this is pursued by excavating the root significance of the 'multiple rationalities' of life. In contrast to Husserl, who differentiated living types according to their degree of participation in the world, the phenomenology of life disentangles living types from within the ontopoietic web of life itself. The human creative act reveals itself as the Great Divide of the Logos of Life - a divide that does not separate but harmonizes, thus dispelling both naturalistic and spiritualistic reductionism. (shrink)

The compilers of the Hippocratic gynaecological treatises often recommend sexual intercourse as part of treatments for women’s diseases. In addition, they often prescribe the use of ingredients that are obvious phallic symbols. This paper argues that the use of sexual therapy in the Hippocratic gynaecological treatises was more extended than previously considered. The Hippocratic sexual therapies involve a series of vegetable ingredients that were sexually connoted in antiquity, but have since lost their sexual connotations. In order to understand the sexual (...) signification of products such as myrtle and barley, one must turn to other ancient texts, and most particularly to Attic comedies. These comedies serve here as a semiotic guide in decoding the Hippocratic gynaecological recipes. However, the sexual connotations attached to animal and vegetable ingredients in these two genres have deeper cultural and religious roots; both genres exploited the cultural material at their disposal. (shrink)

This short chapter explores Aquinas’s teaching on the vegetative soul. At first glance, Aquinas does not seem too interested in the vegetative soul, and this type of soul certainly takes last rank compared with the sensory and the intellectual souls, which are of more relevance when it comes to human perfection and morality. However, this does not mean that Aquinas’s teaching on the vegetative soul lacks sophistication. The chapter first examines why there is a need to posit a vegetative soul (...) in the first place. It then turns to the three main functions of the vegetative soul – nutrition, growth, and generation – and how they are related. After addressing in what sense, according to Aquinas, human beings possess a vegetative soul, the chapter closes with a reflection on the relative obscurity of the activities of the vegetative soul. (shrink)

Some brain injured patients are left in a permanent vegetative state, i.e., they have irreversibly lost their capacity for consciousness but retained some autonomic physiological functions, such as breathing unaided. Having discussed the controversial nature of the permanent vegetative state as a diagnostic category, we turn to the question of the patients’ ontological status. Are the permanently vegetative alive, dead, or in some other state? We present empirical data from interviews with relatives of patients, and with experts, to support (...) the view that the ontological state of permanently vegetative patients is unclear: such patients are neither straightforwardly alive nor simply dead. Having defended this view from counter-arguments we turn to the practical question as to how these patients ought to be treated. Some relatives and experts believe it is right for patients to be shifted from their currently unclear ontological state to that of being straightforwardly dead, but many are concerned or even horrified by the only legally sanctioned method guaranteed to achieve this, namely withdrawal of clinically assisted nutrition and hydration. A way of addressing this distress would be to allow active euthanasia for these patients. This is highly controversial; but we argue that standard objections to allowing active euthanasia for this particular class of permanently vegetative patients are weakened by these patients’ distinctive ontological status. (shrink)

The contemporary ‘plant turn’, driven by modern scientific researches into plant potentialities and a renewed philosophical appreciation of botanical lives within Critical Plant Studies, has spurred discussions about the attribution of personhood to plants. However, anxieties subtend the notion of plant personhood, for it being predominantly anchored in an anthropocentric paradigm of autonomous and embodied ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ properties of plant ontology. Drawing from Indigenous Naga animist vegetal ethos and building upon the arguments of Matthew Hall and Michael (...) Marder, the article attempts to transcend this impasse by conceptualising a neological framework of co-constitutive and reciprocal syntropic capacities as the defining elements of a non-anthropocentric vegetal personhood. Subsequently, the study employs this syntropic model of plant personhood to analyse the ethno-literary representations of vegetal agency and communication as syntropic plant capacities within the context of Indigenous Naga animist culture in two short stories from Temsula Ao’s anthology The Tombstone in My Garden (2022). On the whole, the article explores how the syntropic capacities of plants can function as a connective complement between the Western discourses of Critical Plant Studies and the Indigenous Naga animist arboreal worldviews to facilitate re-membering of an ecocentric plant personhood. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explain Aristotle’s definition of the vegetative part of the soul in the De anima from a methodological point of view. I discuss Aristotle’s conception of the soul and his conception of “parts of the soul” before I turn to his definition of the vegetative part of the soul in De anima II 4. I argue that the definition of the vegetative capacity is deliberately abstract so as to cover its various activities under (...) one common heading. I also argue that the De anima deliberately avoids a positive and determinate description of the activity of the soul that is properly responsible for the vegetative functions, and that Aristotle offers such a positive and determinate description in his works dedicated to the actions and affections “common to body and soul”. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people judge patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mental capacity than the dead. They explain this result by claiming that people have implicit dualist or afterlife beliefs. This essay critically evaluates their experimental findings and their proposed explanation. We argue first that the experiments do not support the conclusion that people intuitively think PVS patients have less mentality than the dead. (...) And second, we provide an alternative explanation of our ascriptions of mentality to the dead and PVS patients, one which turns on Epicurean considerations about the nature of death. (shrink)

This article explores the connections between film and ruderal plants: plants that grow spontaneously in anthropized environments and that we often call “weeds”. Thriving across damaged lands, ruderals are not only exceptional companions for thinking with at a time of ecological rupture, but also a way of engaging with less anthropocentric histories. As argued in this paper, such histories also pertain to film. Despite its timid representational interest in ruderals and “weeds”, cinema is concerned with the stories of collaborative survival, (...) companionship and contaminated diversity raised by such turbulent creatures. Framed by a reflection on our ruderal condition, a discussion around some recent artists’ films allows us to explore some of these problems, while putting an accent on the idea of affective ecologies and involutionary modes of perception. (shrink)

This article charts the contiguity of farming and film, blending permaculture and cinema to advance a modality of sustainable film theory and practice we call “permacinema.” As an alternative approach to looking and labour, permaculture exhibits a suite of cinematic concerns, and offers a model for cinematic creativity that is environmentally accountable and sensitive to multispecies entanglements. Through the peaceable gestures of cultivation and restraint, permacinema proposes an ecologically attentive philosophy of moving images in accordance with permaculture’s three ethics: care (...) of earth, care of people, and fair share. We focus on work by Indigenous artists in which plants are encountered not only as raw material or as aesthetic resource but as ingenious agents and insightful teachers whose pedagogical and creative inputs are welcomed into the filmmaking process. By integrating Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies we hope to situate permacinema in the wider project of cinema’s decolonization and rewilding. (shrink)

A bioclimatic eco-renovation project can be implemented in every cell of the city, both in the existing buildings and in the new ones. Reducing the demand for energy can result in the creation of zero-energy houses. Implementing a bioclimatic eco-renovation project is a courageous and innovative initiative. The heat exchange through the building envelope should be controlled since in the early stage of design. The passive design strategies depend on the orientation of the different areas of the building, considering also (...) the glazing areas, the use of different shading devices, the thermal trap zone, thermal masses, ventilation strategies, etc. Greenhouses as one of the basis systems of passive strategies, are designed to conduct desired air to other spaces via direct opening adding special materials for conduction. Greenhouses are constructed to connect inner spaces as a heat transferor. They have the character of a transitional space, located between the indoor and outdoor environment. During the winter their inner temperature is higher as a consequence of the thermal trap meanwhile during summer such structures must be ventilated. Thermal mass is generally applied to the floor or masonry. The use of shading devices is also important during summer in order to reduce the penetration of solar radiation into the building as well as planting vegetation. The applied green houses in Tirana case study are sized according to the international normative, considering also the climate characteristics of the zone. The implementation of the solar chimneys (another passive system) is necessary in order to subtract the fresh air form the anti-bombing underground tunnels, bringing it to the customers (residents). The benefits of such strategy are enormous. The combination of them with the anti-bombing tunnels located in the selected neighborhood in Tirana is crucial, in order to subtract the cool air from the underground due to temperature and air pressure differences. The aim is to include the existing buildings within the comfort zone without the use of mechanical systems. There are also undermined temperature measurements of the underground and ground surface, very close to the zone during winter and summer, in order to better clarify the temperature differences between the areas. It is found that the temperatures of the underground area are relatively constant compared to the ground surface. Photovoltaics panels implemented in the project can convert sunlight into electricity and are considered as solar systems. According to the electricity demand of the inhabitants, specific calculations using Canadian RETScreen expert application in order to fulfill their electricity requirements for one of the buildings located in the neighborhood are undermined. It is observed that the implementation of the PV panels will reduce the GHG emission compared to the base case and also the gross annual GHG will be reduced too. The recycling of the rain water and wastewater is considered too, using reed bed strategy and fertilizing bathing tubes. The solar tube is another technology applied in all the dwellings, which turned to have a very good performance, saving a lot of electrical energy. A specific and unique proposal is designed in order to fulfill graphically the proposed ideas in combination with a software simulation application, MEEC (Montenegrin Energy Efficiency Certification) which is finally used as a tool of better understanding the thermal performance of the considered building as part of the neighborhood. Two scenarios are involved in order to draw conclusions and enhance the building thermal performance category. It is revealed that the added greenhouses involved in the second scenario contribute massively improving the thermal performance of the building. (shrink)

Descartes set for himself the ambitious program of accounting for the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative and sensitive souls without invoking souls or the faculties or powers of souls in his explanations. He rejects the notion that the soul is hylomorphically present in the organs of the body so as to carry out vital and sensory functions. Rather, the body’s organs operate in a purely mechanical fashion. That is what is involved in “mechanizing” these phenomena. The role of the soul (...) is restricted to properly mental functions: to the conscious aspects of sensations and other mental operations; to intellectual acts; and to acts of volition. In effect, soul becomes mind. In order to understand the extent of Descartes’ ambition, this chapter first considers more fully the functions attributed to the soul or to the vital faculties in the Aristotelian and Galenic traditions, and especially the functions of the sensitive soul or power. It draws attention to the cognitive aspects of these functions, beyond the mere operation of the external senses. Then it turns to Descartes’ mechanistic explanations for these cognitive functions. Finally, it situates Descartes’ new mechanistic psychology within the larger context of his novel anthropology, or theory of the human being. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century the new science was introduced through the works of Bacon, Hooke, Boyle, Power, and others. The advocates of the new science promised to divulge the inner workings of nature and to help man overcome his painful fallen state by means of controlling nature. The new sciences of mechanism and corpuscularism were to be based on objective experiments that would reveal the secret inner natures of minerals, vegetables, animals, the sun, moon, and stars. These experiments were done (...) with new and improved telescopes and microscope with magnifications of up to 100 times. One early critic of the new science was Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish was skeptical of the ambitious claims, methodology, instruments, and institutions of the new science. In her work, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, Cavendish argued against “experimental and dioptrical writers,” provided her own account of the natural world, investigated aspects of chemistry, medicine, and the nature of heat and color, as well as many other topics in natural philosophy (OEP 10). While many think Cavendish landed on the wrong side of history with respect to her skepticism regarding microscopes and telescopes, her criticisms of the new science were wide ranging and she was by no means the only one to question the value of such experiments and instruments. While several commentators, like Eve Keller (1997), have argued that Cavendish was against all things experimental, several recent commentators, Emma Wilkins (2014) and Deborah Boyle (2018), have tried to show the much more complicated relationship between Cavendish and the Royal Society and medical studies, respectively. In addition, some commentators, such as Lisa Sarasohn (1984, 2010) and Eve Keller (1997), have argued that Cavendish’s criticisms of the new science are based on her belief that Nature, as a representation of the feminine, was under attack by the experimentalists desire to “penetrate” and “manipulate” her for their own ends. While it is certainly true that Cavendish and many of the experimentalists personified nature as a woman, and that Cavendish does portray the men as trying to make her into something she is not, I agree with Deborah Boyle (2004) that these descriptions are not the focus of her objections to experimentalism. Rather than hold that Cavendish is concerned with, as Sarasohn claims, “the sexual implications for both women and nature of the new philosophy” (2010: 147), it seems that Cavendish’s objections were largely based on her philosophical commitments. However, I believe there is one aspect of the new science that Cavendish does critique from a feminist perspective, and that is what she sees as its institutional nature and its exclusion of women on the basis of sex, and to this I will turn in the last section of the chapter.1 My aim is to address Cavendish’s three major critiques of the new science. The chapter is divided as follows: The first section provides a brief overview of Cavendish’s views on the nature of bodies and perception. The second regards her critique of the methods and aims of the new science as represented by Bacon and Boyle. The third section examines her critique of Hooke and the instruments of experimentalism. The final section lays out her feminist critique of the institution of the new science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Defending Wordsworth, Defending PoetryMark EdmundsonNear the close of Wordsworth’s first great poem, The Ruined Cottage, there arrives an extraordinary moment. Armytage has been telling the story of his friend Margaret’s decline and death to the young narrator of the poem, who is in some sense Wordsworth’s stand-in. Part of the poem’s achievement, Coleridge thought, was the way that Wordsworth conferred a tragic dignity on the sufferings of a common (...) person. Margaret loses her husband, who enlists to fight in America so that he can leave his family his enlistment bonus, saving them from terrible want, perhaps starvation. Margaret never ceases to hope that her husband will return. Whenever a stranger passes by her gate, she stops him and asks for news about Robert. Years go by, Robert does not return home, and Margaret pines gradually away. Each time the wandering Armytage comes back to her door, Margaret is more gaunt and distracted. She neglects her children: one goes off to a meager apprenticeship; the other, the younger boy, dies.Armytage is a stoical character, though not a frigid one. He has withdrawn his energies from the world of human things, and dispersed them throughout nature where they cannot, presumably, be betrayed. Nature will always regenerate itself; the world grows older, but returns each spring to its youth. Nature offers a sort of perfection that’s far removed from the human course of birth, decay, and death.Armytage tells the young narrator Margaret’s story for many reasons, but one, I think, is to instruct him in the management of grief. The wanderer unfolds the tale with such patient eloquence, poise, and restraint that the young man ends up overwhelmed by feelings for Margaret that are, we can assume, much like the ones that Armytage has locked up in himself, has subdued with his reasoning powers. When [End Page 207] the tale is over, Armytage, compassionately if a touch formulaically, tries to salve the young man’s grief: “Enough to sorrow have you given,” he says, “the purposes of Wisdom ask no more.”But if Armytage teaches the young man a measure of stoicism, the narrator’s strongly felt response also succeeds, however transiently, in restoring to the old man his life of feeling. For the lines that follow from Armytage—and that comprise the moment I want to call attention to—convey both force of feeling and supple but sure intellectual power. This synthesis is the culmination of the poem: it dramatizes the rich interpenetration of mind and emotion that The Ruined Cottage has been working toward:“She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here. I well remember that those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear grass on that wall, By mist and silent raindrops silvered o’er, As once I passed, did to my mind convey So still an image of tranquility, So calm and still, and looked so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief The passing shows of being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream that could not live Where meditation was. I turned away, And walked along my road in happiness.”We praise poets, and rightly, when they make fine metaphors, finding the likeness in apparently unlike things. So Robert Frost asked his critics to be more responsive to his figurative breakthroughs: he talked about how we should note what an achievement it was to “turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this.”Yet it can also be a feat to resist the act of metaphor making. And this I think is what Wordsworth is doing in the culminating passage. What calms Armytage is the remembered image of the weeds and the high spear grass silvered by mist and silent rain drops. The fact that this is weeds and grass, that the vegetation is dispersed and multiple, matters a great deal. What we are not getting here is a natural image for Margaret. Such an image—one lovely blowing wand of spear grass, say... (shrink)

This text is devoted to arguing for the thesis that our standard ontology of physical objects is not correct, and to offering a replacement for that ontology. None of the things that we normally take to exist really do exist. There are no animals, vegetables, or minerals. Nothing that I say against the specific physical objects of our standard ontology counts against the general claim that there are physical objects. In fact, I propose an ontology of physical objects that does (...) not suffer from the defects of our standard ontology or from any other defect. What exist, according to the ontology that I propose, are four dimensional hunks of matter, and every filled region of spacetime is exactly filled by one such object. ;In chapter 1, I explain this proposed ontology of four dimensional hunks of matter, give some reason for preferring four dimensional objects over three dimensional ones, and answer some objections to such an ontology. In chapter 2 the ontology is developed in more depth, paying special attention to those features of an object that seem to be most tied to its identity--its persistence conditions and essential properties. It turns out that four dimensional hunks have their spatiotemporal boundaries essentially. I also begin my attack on the standard ontology, offering some reason to believe that they do not really exist, or at least that they do not have the persistence conditions and essential properties that we typically attribute to them. In chapter 3 I present my strongest argument against our standard ontology--a version of the Sorites paradox. I discuss all the possible ways of handling vagueness and show that the only acceptable one is the denial of our standard ontology. In chapter 4 I show that rejecting the standard ontology is not as extreme as it might first seem since another ontology can be offered in its place and a paraphrase can be set up, thereby showing that even our most important and effective utterances need not be committed to the standard ontology. This other ontology is that of four dimensional hunks of matter. (shrink)

National scientists have elaborated the reform's gist, approaches, stages and consequences in the Ukrainian agricultural sector during the XX - XXI centuries. These studies have been conducted by N. Zhulkanych, S. Zhyvora, M. Zyza, M. Lendiel, E. Mazur, O. Malyarchuk, V. Nechytailo and many others. The paper aims to perform the comprehensive study of general trends and peculiar features of the agricultural development of the Ukrainian SSR in 1963-1990 and to define actual advances and drawbacks on the basis of analysis (...) of historical records and scientific literature. The object of research is agriculture as part of socialist economy in the USSR. The subject of research is the implementation features of agricultural policy of the Soviet power in the Ukrainian SSR, using the Western region of the Republic as an example. The economic strategy of the Soviet power involved a long-term industrialization of the agricultural sector. A distinguishing feature of the industrialization process was the use of systems of machinery in all branches of agriculture. The technological chain had to embrace the process from the sporadic application of machinery to the overall mechanization and automation of crop and livestock farming. The industrial background of production predetermined the implementation of the system of machinery with extensive power consumption, i.e. with the new technical bases. The resolutions of the March Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee defined the economic priorities and capacity development of the Republic. Capital investments were the economic basis for the increase of production potential of collective and state farms, solution of social problems in rural regions. The land productivity was increased mainly by means of land reclamation and production chemization, use of organic and mineral fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, etc. The supply of mineral fertilizers increased, but most of them were of low quality, non-concentrated and unbalanced in nutritional ingredients. In its turn it caused irreparable damage to the environment and polluted agricultural products with chemicals. The chemization undermined the population health and disrupted the ecological balance. Despite ultimate achievements in the rise of the industrial level of agriculture of the Ukrainian SSR, it didn't meet the needs of collective and state farms. A great number of labour-intensive processes in animal and crop farming were performed manually. In state farms, contrary to collective farms, the stock of tractors was newer, but much smaller. For many years the USSR was in the top ten countries of the world in terms of consumption of energy and proteins, contained in food products per capita. However, the food patterns were inconsistent with the scientifically grounded norm. Structural imbalance of the food ration was the manifestation of the food crisis in the USSR. To meet primary needs of Soviet citizens in food products the May Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee adopted the "Food Program of the USSR for the Period until 1990 and Measures of Its Implementation". The main issue of the Food program was to increase grain harvest. Grain production was the basis for food and fodder supply of the country. Alongside with a substantial increase in food products output in public economy the attention was given to the development of subsidiary individual holdings and fruit-and-vegetable cooperatives. The cooperatives and subsidiary holdings produced a great number of dairy and meat products, vegetables and fruits both for their own needs and for sale in collective farm markets. The state food program predetermined the solution of agricultural problems by means of formerly used methods. The major problem of agriculture had to be solved by means of increase in the gross grain harvest. Thus, the implementation of agricultural policy of Soviet power in the Ukrainian SSR lead to great changes in agricultural production. At that time there appeared such new branches of economy specialized in services to agricultural production as waterworks and land reclamation, feed mill industry, farm building, machine engineering for animal farming and fodder production, procurement of agricultural products and agricultural processing. The study of this policy implementation proves that the average annual rates of agricultural production increased but they were inconsistent with high investments. On the one hand, the Food program testified the "food crisis in the USSR", demonstrating the lag of the world socialist community from capitalist states. On the other hand, it had to increase the level of food self-sufficiency, decrease the procurement of agricultural products from abroad and promote the solution of the world food problem in general. (shrink)

If the history of metaphysics is, as Heidegger suggests, essentially humanist, the questions that have been addressed to humanism, united under the label of posthumanism, face the challenge of establishing a rupture with a bimillenary hegemony of the human against the non-human. This paper will be interested in problematizing the way in which the humanist model has attributed to man the privilege of being the only being capable of acting and shaping the world. The objective will be to explore an (...) expanded perspective of agency towards the animal, vegetable and material world. From the proliferation of the possibilities of agency we will discover, in turn, different ways of forming and inhabiting worlds: the world as a totalizing sphere, as a set of surrounding worlds and as a mixture of material agencies. Finally, this perspective tending towards the de-hierarchization of human agency will be contrasted with the difficulties posed by the notion of the Anthropocene. Man's responsibility for the geological scope of his activity re-emphasizes the centrality of his capacity for agency, thus showing the contradictions that arise in attempts to go beyond humanism. (shrink)

I make my living by writing. Someone once said to me, "It's no good writing like this; you've no life! "At first I thought he meant I was dead, and I got very angry. Then I suddenly thought that the word' life" could be used in a different way. Writers often go and live for a while in remote places where conditions are hard, and such excursions are called "experiencing life." This expression may sound as if it refers to a (...) corpse momentarily coming back to life, but that is not actually what it means. These writers do it in order to gain some understanding of a hard life and to write better books, and it is a very good way to set about it. This was what the person speaking to me meant by "life": He did not mean I needed to die. When I realized that, my anger turned to joy. Although I had lived and worked with a production team in a very poor area, I did not consider that I had seen enough of life. Far from it; in fact, I needed more experience of it. But I still felt that "experiencing the hard life" would be a better way of putting it. Leaving out the adjective implies that "life" means frequently having to suffer hardship—there is a presumption that life is to be understood especially in a negative sense. People of my age have all had the experience of contrasting present happiness with past misery: Listening to reports of past sufferings, eating "recalling suffering" meals, and so on. This is not the same as "experiencing life," but there are some similarities. As we all know, in the old society poor people led lives worse than the lives of cattle, eating chaff and greens—not vegetables, but wild plants—and the "recalling suffering" meals were modeled on the diet of the poor in the old society. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and thought-provoking study, Maryanne Cline Horowitz explores the image and idea of the human mind as a garden: under the proper educational cultivation, the mind may nourish seeds of virtue and knowledge into the full flowering of human wisdom. This copiously illustrated investigation begins by examining the intellectual world of the Stoics, who originated the phrases "seeds of virtue" and "seeds of knowledge." Tracing the interrelated history of the Stoic cluster of epistemological images for natural law within (...) humanity--reason, common notions, sparks, and seeds--Horowitz presents the distinctive versions within the competing movements of Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity, Augustinian and Thomist theologies, Christian mysticism and Kabbalah, and Erasmian Catholicism and the Lutheran Reformation. She demonstrates how the Ciceronian and Senecan analogies between horticulture and culture--basic to Italian Renaissance humanists, artists, and neo- Platonists--influence the emergence of emblems and essays among participants in the Northern Renaissance neo-Stoic movement. The Stoic metaphor is still visible today in ecumenical movements that use vegetative language to encourage the growth of shared values and to promote civic virtues: organizations disseminate information on nipping bad habits in the bud and on turning a new leaf. The author's evidence of illustrated pages from medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment texts will stimulate contemporary readers to evaluate her discovery of "the premodern scientific paradigm that the mind develops like a plant.". (shrink)

It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in a permanent vegetative state, debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness, controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia, and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. (...) However, though work has been done on the moral significance of elements of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, little explicit attention has been devoted to the ethical significance of consciousness. In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of the value present within conscious experience. This account emphasizes not only the nature of consciousness, but the importance of items within experience such as affect, valence, and the complex overall shape of particular valuable experiences. Shepherd also relates this account to difficult cases involving non-humans and those with disorders of consciousness, arguing that the value of consciousness influences and partially explains the degree of moral status a being possesses, without fully determining it. The upshot is a deeper understanding of both the moral importance of phenomenal consciousness and its relations to moral status. This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

Advances in medical technology raise new ethical and legal questions which are in turn forcing a reassessment of medical practices and the goals of legislation. This book pays close attention to these questions, bringing together leading scholars to explore a range of topics in this wide ranging collection covering persistent vegetative state, control of fertility, reproductive technologies and the autonomy in the context of medical research practice.

Heterocyst spacing in blue -green bacteria is widely assumed to be due to a diffusible inhibitor. The inhibitor, a nitrogen-rich compound, probably glutamine, is produced via the N2-fixing enzymes of the heterocyst and in turn serves to suppress the induction of these enzymes and of the differentiation of vegetative cells to heterocysts. This simple morphogenetic mechanism operating in growing cellular filaments ofAnabaena species is investigated on the basis of a continuous and a discrete cellular model, as well as by (...) cell-by-cell simulation of the inhibitor transport. The resulting distances between heterocysts and kinetics of their production are compared with observations, and the values of physical parameters are estimated from the models. (shrink)

Literacy is, literally, a question not of education but of the letter. More than that, it is the question of the letter in the two senses the word has in English: as a symbol of the alphabet and a piece of correspondence. It is my hypothesis that ecological literacies may learn a great deal from the literalization, or even the hyper-literalization, of the letter and that they may do so by turning to the corpus of twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, polymath, and (...) mystic St. Hildegard of Bingen. After all, Hildegard, who was exquisitely attuned to the vegetal world, which was at the core of her theological and scientific endeavors, corresponded through letters with the leading personalities of her times and also invented a language, called _lingua ignota_ (the unknown language) replete with _ignotas litteras_ (the unknown letters). Who better than her can spell out the senses of ecological literacy? (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this short text, I analyze various senses of being in time. My claim is that time forms a weird interiority through an embrace of whatever is “in” it. I, then, flesh out this claim through a close reading of Book IV in Aristotle's Physics, while grafting each “measure of movement,” through which the Greek philosopher defines time, onto the movements of plants. The result is a twisting and turning, ramified, wayward temporality that holds every sense of being in (...) time in a vegetal embrace. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nietzsche as Self-Made ManAlexander NehamasComposing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology, by Graham Parkes; xiv & 481 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, $37.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.I cannot resist beginning this essay on Graham Parkes’s study of Nietzsche’s psychology with the first-person pronoun. Parkes provides an erudite and suggestive presentation of Nietzsche’s views on the soul, according to which what we consider that most unitary element of human (...) nature turns out to be the product of bringing together disparate and often conflicting independent agencies. He also provides valuable information about the sources of Nietzsche’s thought, and details a number of connections between Nietzsche’s ideas and his life. Yet, in a book of close to five hundred pages, Parkes self-consciously avoids the first-person pronoun altogether. He speaks of the “I,” which is after all the subject of his book, but the I never speaks itself. Why? Because “what is important here are Nietzsche’s ideas, rather than Parkes’s”; also, because “the whole point of Nietzsche’s psychology is to put the I in question, to prompt the question ‘Who?’ at its every appearance, to hear the polyphony behind the apparent univocality of the first person singular” (p. 310).Though not the first, Nietzsche was one of the most radical dissectors of the human soul. Where others had found unity, order, and indivisibility, Nietzsche uncovered an untidy, often uncontrolled multiplicity. Instead of a consistent, harmonious whole, he saw a messy complex of beliefs, desires, values, views, drives, affects, and habits, picked up at [End Page 487] different times, from disparate, even incompatible sources, moving in different directions; far from fitting naturally into a union, these compete with one another for mastery and control of the person: “The belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon... ought to be expelled from science,” he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil. But, he continued, “between ourselves it is not at all necessary to get rid of the soul at the same time.... But the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as mortal soul, and soul as subjective multiplicity, and soul as social structure of the drives and the affects want henceforth to have citizens’ rights in science.”The breakdown of the soul into independent and often conflicting parts has two radical consequences. First, it implies that some parts of our souls—of our selves—may remain hidden, obscured, suppressed or ignored by others, especially by those that achieve at least apparent dominance and can therefore speak in the first-person. In Nietzsche’s political metaphor, they are like a governing class which speaks for the whole state. This, of course, is the central idea of depth psychology; and Parkes shows how both Freud and Jung were indebted to Nietzsche’s pioneering geography of the soul. Second, to think that the soul is multiple is to think that it is not unalterable: its parts can affect one another; out of their conflict, new configurations are possible. Some parts can be cultivated or left to wither; others can be allowed to run wild or become domesticated; still others can be subordinated to one another or allowed to function in more or less equitable ways. The soul—the person—is not a preexistent unity; it is constructed, or, as Parkes, mindful of Nietzsche’s deep involvement with music, puts it so well, composed.Parkes provides a brilliant catalogue of the metaphors (mineral, vegetal, animal, personal, and political) Nietzsche uses to describe the elements of the multifarious soul. He also produces a sort of recipe for their successful composition into a coherent whole. “Opening up” to as many conflicting drives as possible, we let them be mastered by one or more dominant ones and we subject their multiplicity to the discipline imposed by those ruling passions. Once that discipline becomes instinctive, active control is relaxed and, somehow, the multiplicity spontaneously orders itself. We become, again, natural (p. 377).Now, we know that Nietzsche spent much of his life “doing battle” with Socrates. He passionately despised the... (shrink)

In 1747, James Lind carried out an experiment which proved the usefulness of citrus fruit as a cure for scurvy. Nonetheless, he rejected the earlier hypothesis of Bachstrom that the absence of fresh fruit and vegetables was the only cause of the disease. I explain why it was rational for James Lind not to accept Bachstrom’s explanation. I argue that it was the urge for scientific understanding that guided Lind in his rejection and in the development of his alternative theory (...) that humidity was the primary cause of the disease. Central in this process was the search for causal mechanisms which could provide understanding of how the disease developed and which fitted in with the knowledge of the time. Given that the relevant background knowledge and statistical methods were not yet available to Lind, he was right to prefer his own explanation to that of Bachstrom. Although his explanation turned out to be wrong, and Bachstrom’s right, from a historical point of view it offered deeper causal understanding of both the development of the disease and the preventive and curative effects of fresh vegetable food. This case study illustrates how the search for causal mechanisms can not only be enlightening, but also very misleading. (shrink)

Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled (...) ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. (shrink)

This paper explores the scientific sources behind Kant’s early dynamic theory of matter in 1755, with a focus on two main Kant’s writings: Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens and On Fire. The year 1755 has often been portrayed by Kantian scholars as a turning point in the intellectual career of the young Kant, with his much debated conversion to Newton. Via a careful analysis of some salient themes in the two aforementioned works, and a reconstruction of the (...) scientific sources behind them, this paper shows Kant’s debt to an often overlooked scientific tradition, i.e. speculative Newtonian experimentalism. The paper argues that more than the Principia, it was the speculative experimentalism that goes from Newton’s Opticks to Herman Boerhaave’s Elementa chemiae via Stephen Hales’ Vegetable Staticks that played a central role in the elaboration of Kant’s early dynamic theory of matter in 1755. (shrink)

While neuroethics is generally thought to be a modern addition to the broader field of bioethics, this subdiscipline has existed in clinical practice throughout the course of the 20th century. In this essay, Fins describes an older tradition of clinical neuroethics that featured such physician-humanists as Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, and Fred Plum, whose work and legacy exploring disorders of consciousness is highlighted. Their normative work was clinically grounded and focused on the needs of patients, in contrast to modern (...) neuroethics, which is more speculative and distant from the lived reality of the clinic. Using recent developments in the diagnosis and treatment of disorders of consciousness, and the history of the vegetative and minimally conscious states, Fins asks why modern neuroethics has taken this turn and what can be done to restore clinical neuroethics to a more proportionate place in the field. (shrink)

This article examines how geologists, botanists, and ecologists used pollen as a proxy for past climates in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on a particular challenge of measuring climate with pollen: pollen’s mobility. As scientists came to learn, pollen from some vegetation is more mobile than others. Pollen’s differential mobility challenged regional climatic conclusions because of the potential mixing of pollen from various locations. To minimize the effects of this problem, pollen analysts sought to decrease the (...) noise produced by highly local or foreign pollen. Yet, many ground-truthing and calibration methods were not available to pollen analysts because of the temporal separation between the observer and the object of interest. Instead, pollen analysts had to make spatial meaning out of fossil pollen using empirical studies of modern pollen, inferences from macrofossils and successional history, and applying statistical theories to fossil pollen data. Many of these corrections factors relied on pollen analysts’ knowledge of place, including elements like the location’s topography, prevailing winds, and plant cover. These elements were a natural part of vegetation-pollen-climate interactions. Scientists needed to account for them to turn pollen into a proxy for climate. Pollen’s movement was equally natural, but scientists decided to eliminate some pollen to augment the regional climate signal. These selective eliminations of place suggest that not all elements of place are equally important. Scientists had to omit some elements of place to make sense of the complexities of the natural world. (shrink)

The distinction between taxonomic plant geography and ecological plant geography was never absolute: it would be historically inaccurate to portray them as totally divergent. Taxonomists occasionally borrowed ecological concepts, and ecologists never completely repudiated taxonomy. Indeed, some botanists pursued the two types of geographic study. The American taxonomist Henry Allan Gleason (1882–1975), for one, made noteworthy contributions to both. Most of Gleason's research appeared in short articles, however. He never published a major synthetic work comparable in scope or influence to (...) the ecological texts of Clements, Schimper, and Warming.Despite exceptions such as Gleason, most plant geographers throughout the twentieth century have emphasized the distinction between ecological and taxonomic plant geographies. Why have these distinct traditions developed? In his book Geographical Ecology, Robert MacArthur has suggested a psychological explanation for the dichotomy: “Unraveling the history of a phenemenon has always appealed to some people and describing the machinery of the phenomenon to others... The ecologist and physical scientist tend to be machinery oriented, whereas paleontologists and most biogeographers tend to be history oriented.”46Without necessarily rejecting MacArthur's explanation, my study suggests a more complex relationship between taxonomic and ecological plant geographies. At the turn of the century a group of botanists self-consciously defined a new area of botanical research. These ecologists defined their new discipline in opposition to what they believed was a moribund, nineteenth-century, natural-history tradition. They turned from historically oriented, descriptive, taxonomic plant geography to experimental physiology. The new ecological plant geography was to focus on communities rather than on species, on proximate environmental causes rather than on historical explanations, and on physiological experiments rather than on morphological descriptions.As we look back, much of the “revolt from morphology” was rhetorical. Ecologists never completely replaced species as units of distribution, nor did they set geography on an explicitly physiological basis. Indeed, much of early ecological research was, quite simply, descriptive. Plant communities were defined in terms of dominant species, representative life forms, or general physiognomy. The underlying physiological basis for community characteristics was more often assumed than demonstrated by experiments.Despite the fact that ecological plant geography was not a truly physiological specialty, it was significantly different from more traditional taxonomic plant geography. First, ecologists were less explicitly evolutionary in their approach than were taxonomists. Following Darwin, most taxonomic plant geographers viewed distribution in historical terms. In contrast, early ecologists tended to ignore the traditional geographic problems. Most ecologists were skeptical of historical explanations, emphasizing instead the proximate, environmental causes of distribution. While some nineteenth-century biogeographers had studied the correlation between climate and vegetation, twentieth-century ecologists focused much more sharply on the interactions between plant and environment. Plant ecologists did not place biogeography on a physiological basis, but by emphasizing physiology they laid the foundation for a more detailed understanding of adaption. This emphasis on physiology and environmental causation was a second distinguishing characteristic of ecological plant geography. Finally, the idea of the plant community, articulated by Eugenius Warming in 1895, provided ecologists with a unique perspective on the distribution of plants. For early ecologists, the community was more than an assemblage of species; it was an integrated unit. The distribution of these units became the major focus of ecological plant geography. Communities never completely replaced species as geographic units, and the distinction between flora and vegetation was often blurred. Nonetheless, ecologists were innovative in studying the distribution of structurally and functionally integrated groups of plants.In the twentieth century plant geography has occupied an anomalous position in biology. It has not developed into an autonomous discipline, nor has it been incorporated into the developing discipline of ecology. Ecologists and taxonomists have pursued fairly distinct styles of geographic research, with the result that two relatively independent approaches to the study of plant distribution have persisted. (shrink)

A substantial portion of produce harvested around the world is wasted because it does not meet consumers’ shape expectations. Only recently has research begun investigating the causes underlying misshapen produce rejection by consumers. Generally, this limited research has concluded that misshapen produce is subject to an ugly penalty, leading consumers to form biased expectations regarding product attributes (e.g., healthiness, tastiness, or naturalness). In this research, we propose that this ugly penalty extends to the moral valuation of misshapen produce and that (...) this moral penalty is rooted in the feelings of disgust evoked by the visual appearance of such produce. Across five studies and two pilot studies, we show that misshapen fruits and vegetables are disgust elicitors, and that felt disgust causes consumers to make negative moral associations with produce which, in turn, leads to decreased preference. We also show that pairing misshapen produce with a positive unconditioned stimulus (i.e., an image of attractive individuals) is an efficient solution to counteract the effect of this stereotype. This research contributes to the growing body of work demonstrating the link between consumption behaviors, consumer preferences, and morality. (shrink)

This special issue, Withholding artificial nutrition and hydration, comprises several papers, commentaries and responses centred largely around the issues raised by the 2011 decision of the English Court of Protection in W v M.i In that case, the mother of an adult patient applied for the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment . In 2003, the patient, M, had contracted viral encephalitis and suffered irreparable brain damage as a result. She fell into a coma, and when she emerged appeared to be in (...) a vegetative state and for 8 years was entirely dependent on life-sustaining care.Following her mother's application, M was held to lack capacity and hence in accordance with section 4 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 , the matter turned on whether it was in her best interests for the treatment to be withdrawn. It was made clear in the 1993 decision of Airedale NHS Trust v Bland that life-sustaining treatment could be withdrawn from a patient in a permanent vegetative state if, on balance, it was not in his or her interest to continue treatment.ii The MCA also allows for withdrawal of treatment, although the approach to best interests is slightly different. However, the case of W v M is importantly different from the Bland case, because M was found not to be in a PVS, but instead was minimally conscious . Much evidence was presented of her capacity to respond to stimuli, seemingly express emotion and occasionally speak.In the first of his papers in this issue , Julian Sheather provides an overview of the case, particularly illuminating the discussions of M's interests and the views of her …. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate Johann Christoph Sturm’s (1635–1703) mechanist account of plant life. The problem of life is one of the touchstones of any early modern mechanist philosophy. Plant life, in turn, constitutes the most rudimentary form of life. Sturm’s account is functionalist: plants perform the life-function: nutrition, growth, self-preservation, and generation. Sturm makes clear that what his Aristotelian predecessors called the ‘vegetative soul’ must be reduced to (1) the possession of an organic body (i.e., a higher-order structure (...) of matter and its modifications) and (2) the extrinsic kinetic heat of the sun. In contrast to mechanists like Descartes, Sturm accepts teleology. He deals with the origin and transfer of motion on occasionalist grounds. For Sturm, all processes associated with the life of plants can be accounted for mechanically—all but the ultimate origin of the first plant’s seed, for which Sturm relies on the theory of pre-existence. (shrink)

Herbaria principally host and study collections of dried vegetal specimens, and the curators and researchers employed there are mainly systematic botanists working on plant taxonomy. Twenty years ago, a textographic investigation of the University of Michigan Herbarium was conducted as part of a larger study. In this follow-up inquiry, we investigate what sort of changes have – or have not – occurred over the intervening period. Two of the five original Herbarium informants are still working there, and mainly through (...) text-based interviews and discourse analysis we trace their subsequent careers and research outputs. We find that there has been considerable technological change since the 1990s, such as the growth of molecular studies, the digitization of specimens, and the use of the web, which has greatly impacted the processes of scholarly textual production. However, technological effects on the highly distinctive genres of systematic botany turn out to be more moderate. This genre set, comprising monograph, flora, treatment, and protologue, remains little known to those who study the more general discourses of the academic and research worlds. (shrink)

The journal continues to publish translations of individual chapters of the book by the famous phenomenologist Michael Marder "Plants of Philosophers (Intellectual Herbarium)". Out of twelve stories, "Irigaray’s Water Lily" was chosen. The author analyzes the views of a modern French philosopher Luce Irigaray, whose numerous books contain a feminist revision of traditional philosophy and its language. Today, having thrown off the straitjacket of metaphysical reasoning, living thought turns to physicality, marked by finiteness and sexual differences, as well as to (...) the surrounding world, to the rhythms of the earth and the richness of non-Western philosophical traditions. Luce Irigaray's creativity is rooted in all those dimensions of experience that she was able to restore at the sunset of metaphysics. In the work of Irigaray, the vegetable occupies a special place and stimulates the development of her thoughts. Plants provide her with a model of thinking, living and cultivating subjectivity. Cultivation in this case does not mean the formation of the physis in accordance with the predetermined parameters of the mind or the forcible eradication of what grows by itself. On the contrary, cultivating nature, for example, means that we put ourselves at her service, protecting, participating and encouraging myriad plants. Irigaray calls us to listen to the muted vegetative rhythms of our life and thinking, whose growth has been stopped by the prejudices of metaphysics and the arrhythmia of modern existence. Everything that Western philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel rejected and devalued in relation to plants, in her works is lovingly extracted, overestimated and cultivated. (shrink)

Known as Associations for the Support of Peasant Agriculture (Association de Maintien de l’Agriculture Paysanne), AMAPs started to spread in France just after year 2000. These trust-based partnerships between urban consumers and farmers share some proximity with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) organizations that developed in North America in the 1990s. Both organizations fight against large scale food chains and advocate for the necessity to change eating habits and mostly to switch to fresh seasonal organic products. They also stress the importance (...) of setting human direct relations between the urban and agrarian areas. As AMAPs were also recently supported by students and introduced as CSAs in several French universities, this paper, backed by ethnographical fieldwork, describes how and why students decided to run CSAs on the campus of Aix-Marseille University (AMU). Students turned themselves into shareholders in AMAPs. They started to run them and deliver weekly fresh fruits and vegetables to three different university venues in AMU. Delivery is tailored for students needs and also allows students to experience collective farming. (shrink)

Ecology shows that living beings, with all their diversity, make up a homogenous system on the earth's surface, with rules that are no less exacting than those applicable to gravitational astronomy (celestial mechanics). The physical energy coming from the sun in the form of radiation is attracted by green plant-life, be it vegetation growing on the land or microscopic algae floating on the surface of the ocean; this energy is then transformed into chemical energy, with, incidentally, a modest yield, due (...) to the process of chlorophyllian synthesis. This stage is the only one to include a productive process—an anabolism. Other sorts of living beings derive their energy and the elements necessary for their sustenance and multiplication from organic matter devised in this way. Some vegetarian animals feed on them and are in their turn prey to predators which are themselves devoured by other predators. Food chains, grouped in bunches or network systems, are thus established on the principle of a complex pyramid. Each consumer occupies a place at a trophic level, which is clearly defined, where he guarantees the conveyance of matter and energy which are degraded in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. These biological mechanisms entail numerous species, ranging from the most elementary forms of life to birds and mammals. Decomposition agents then recycle the mineral elements and make them available to plants. In any given area, the inert chemical elements and the community of living beings (embracing all species) together constitute a biological entity or ecosystem, this is a kind of supraspecific organism which functions with a certain flexibility, and yet is ordered down to the last detail. Just as a man consists of a heart, lungs, a liver, so a natural community consists of “organs” which are each made up of one of the various constituent species. These ecosystems are the fundamental units of the living world and they are relatively independent of one another, although exchanges do occur between them. They all come together to form a balanced system which encompasses the whole complex of living beings. This is the biosphere, a gigantic mechanism with innumerable cogs and gears which have evolved in harmony with each other throughout the whole of history, going as far back as the first trace of life on earth. (shrink)

Following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican farmers altered their livelihood strategies to respond to changing market incentives. While many commercial farmers responded to falling maize prices brought on by NAFTA by shifting into the production of vegetables for export, the coping strategies of low-income farmers have been varied, from diversifying income sources through off-farm employment, to migration, to searching for niche markets for new or added-value products. In the Totonocan region of the state of (...) Veracruz, Mexico, many farmers who can no longer earn sufficient income from the sale of maize grain are turning to a byproduct of maize to generate income. The commercialization of totomoxtle, or maize husks, for domestic and international markets has not only enabled farmers to continue to profit from maize production, but it has also encouraged farmers to utilize and conserve criollo maize varieties that serve as important reservoirs of genetic diversity. Moreover, the growing importance of totomoxtle in livelihood strategies has caused some farmers to alter their maize management, selecting for better quality husks rather than for grain production. The purpose of this paper is to understand both the broad impact of NAFTA on the local agricultural economy and its more specific effects on the management of maize in the Zona Totonaca. Participation in international trade can lead to unexpected outcomes, in some cases creating new values for goods with a long history of local consumption. Commercialization of maize husks is likely to be only a temporary solution for the relief of rural poverty. Given the volatility of international markets, the long-term welfare of farmers may depend on the development of more diversified production strategies. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s passion for nature is well known. Less known is the fact that Rousseau devoted himself to the study of botany in the last years of his life. This article investigates how the themes of denaturation and monstrosity - classical themes of Rousseau’s thought - appear in his reflections on plants and the vegetal kingdom. After a brief incursion into the second Discourse and Émile, we will focus on the analysis of the so-called Elementary Letters on Botany, sent (...) to Madeleine-Catherine Delessert, and the letters sent to the Duchess of Portland. In the first set of letters we find Rousseau’s views on double flowers and grafting. In the second set of letters, in turn, we find Rousseau’s views on gardens and the cultivation of exotic plants. Since Rousseau’s reflections on denaturation are entirely due to his reading of Buffon, the article also addresses the contributions of this author. We conclude with some reflections on the current state of our teratological tendency, well identified by the authors we discussed throughout the text. (shrink)

This bibliographical review of the modelling of the mitotic apparatus covers a period of one hundred and twenty years, from the discovery of the bipolar mitotic spindle up to the present day. Without attempting to be fully comprehensive, it will describe the evolution of the main ideas that have left their mark on a century of experimental and theoretical research. Fol and Bütschli's first writings date back to 1873, at a time when Schleiden and Schwann's cell theory was rapidly gaining (...) ground throughout Germany. Both mitosis and chromosomes were to be discovered within the space of thirty years, along with the two key events in the animal and plant reproductive cycle, namely fecondation and meiosis. The mitotic pole, a term still in use to this day, was employed to describe a morphological fact which was noted as early as 1876, namely that the lines and the dots of the karyokinetic figure, with its spindle and asters, looks remarkably like the lines of force around a bar magnet. This was to lead to models designed to explain the movements of chromosomes which take place when the cell nucleus appears to cease to exist as an organelle during mitosis. The nature of those mechanisms and the origin of the forces behind the chromosomes' ordered movements were central to the debate. Auguste Prenant, in a remarkable bibliographical synthesis published in 1910, summed up the opposing viewpoints of the vitalists, on the one hand, who favoured the theory of contractility or extensility in spindle fibres, and of those who believed in models based on physical phenomena, on the other. The latter subdivided into two groups: some, like Bütschli, Rhumbler or Leduc, referred to diffusion, osmosis and superficial tension, whilst the others, led by Gallardo and Hartog, focussed on the laws of electromagnetism. Lillie, Kuwada and Darlington followed up this line of research. The mid-20th century was a major turning point. Most of the modelling mentioned above was criticized and fell into disuse after disappearing from research publications and textbooks.This marked the onset of a new era, as electron microscopes made possible the materialization and detailed study of the macromolecular elements of the fibres, filaments and microtubules of the cytoskeleton. The successive phases of (a) de Harven and Bernhard's 1956 discovery of the centriole's ultrastructure, (b) its identification with the basal body of the cilia and flagella, confirming the theory set out by Henneguy and von Lenhossek (1898–99), (c) the universal presence of microtubules in animal, vegetal and eukaryotic protist cells, (d) the polymerization-depolymerization induced reversible transformations of the tubulin pool in mitosing cells (Inoue, 1960), (e) ultrastructural comparative studies of the mitotic apparatus of eukaryotes illustrating the Pickett-Heaps integrating concept of the MTOC (microtubule-organizing centre), (f) the possibility ofin vitro experiments on mtocs or on microtubules, brings us upon the present day, which has seen the focus placed on the concept of motor-proteins (kinesin, dynein) and on cell cycle models. The latter are based on a close coincidence between the observable modifications of the mitotic apparatus and the periodic variations in intracellular concentrations of calcium or of certain enzymes (cyclins, Cdc2) during the main transitions of the cell cycle. (shrink)

A key philosophical feature of Peter Jackson’s film interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is its use of fantasy to inspire a “recovery” of the actual or, in other words, a reawakening to the beauty of nature and the many possible ways of living in healthier ecological relation to the world. Though none of these ways is perfectly achieved, this pluralistic view is demonstrated in the various lifeways of Hobbits, Elves, Men, and Ents. All of the positive (...) relationships embodied in the films—to trees, mountains, horses, and vegetable gardens—involve loving care and attention, receiving nourishment and livelihood without instrumentalization, or reducing nature to mere resource. The films also vividly display a variety of ugly and destructive ways of using the land to accrue power and wealth. These noxious ways, specifically because they actively destroy the lands that they use, always need more. They will thus eventually annihilate the beautiful ways of being if they are not actively resisted. Some of those who would rather be tending their own trees, gardens, or horses or even wandering in the wild forests must therefore turn their attention to struggle and resistance instead. This is a struggle full of grief, and at times even verging on despair, but it is marked by the refusal to give up hope. Indeed, what Jackson and Tolkien have to say about hope is as important in responding to the ecological crisis as anything they have to say about nature, inasmuch as they help to remind us that even in our own times, “there is still hope.”. (shrink)

Fifty years have passed since brain death was first proposed as a criterion of death. Its advocates believe that with the destruction of the brain, integrated functioning ceases irreversibly, somatic unity dissolves, and the organism turns into a corpse. In this article, I put forward two objections against this assertion. First, I draw parallels between brain death and other pathological conditions and argue that whenever one regards the absence or the artificial replacement of a certain function in these pathological conditions (...) as compatible with organismic unity, then one equally ought to tolerate that function’s loss or replacement in brain death. Second, I show that the neurological criterion faces an additional problem that is only coming to light as life-supporting technology improves: the growing sophistication of the latter gives rise to a dangerous decoupling of the actual performance of a vital function from the retention of neurological control over it. Half a century after its introduction, the neurological criterion is facing the same fate as its cardiopulmonary predecessor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Buridan, Quaestiones super libros "De generatione et corruptione" Aristotelis: A Critical Edition with an IntroductionPeter G. SobolMichiel Streijger, Paul J. J. M. Bakker, and Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen, editors. John Buridan, Quaestiones super libros "De generatione et corruptione" Aristotelis : A Critical Edition with an Introduction. History of Science and Medicine Library, 17. Medieval and Early Modern Science, 14. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2010. Pp. ix + 269. (...) Cloth, $141.00.To readers of these pages, John Buridan needs no introduction. A popular and influential teacher in his own time, he came early to the attention of historians of medieval intellectual history who, for the most part, have rested content to read his works in manuscripts and early printed editions. So it is a happy occasion to welcome a new critical edition of a work by Buridan, especially one that expands our access to Buridan's thought beyond his logic, physics, and cosmology.In the introduction, the editors recount the manuscript traditions of Buridan's literal commentary on De generatione et corruptione and the more complex tradition of the Quaestiones, which is the work edited here. The editors discovered two versions of the Quaestiones and chose to work with the version represented by the greater number of manuscripts. They provide detailed evidence from shared accidents among the manuscripts of this version to support their stemma codicum. Using the stemma, they selected a base manuscript and two others, each representing a distinct branch, for collation. The text itself is accompanied by an apparatus criticus and an apparatus fontium.In De generatione et corruptione, Aristotle tried to improve upon the inadequate efforts of his predecessors to explain growth and change in the terrestrial realm. After dismissing atomism and theories relying on a single or several persisting elements, he offered his own theory, in which four primary qualities inhere in prime matter to form four elements, which in turn combine to form mineral, vegetable, and animal bodies. But, as they tried to work out the consequences of his theory, Aristotle's Arabic and Latin commentators discovered several problems, one of which became perhaps the most widely discussed problem in medieval philosophy: how to reconcile the idea that the properties of compound substances derive from the proportion of their constituent elements with the idea that those properties derive from the compound's substantial form. This problem becomes even more difficult when the compound in question is a living body, especially when the living body is human. The problem was addressed by philosophers in commentaries on various works of Aristotle, by theologians in commentaries on the Sentences, and even by physicians. Some historians, such as Anneliese Meier, have seen this as a conflict between the Aristotelian theory of matter and Aristotelian metaphysics, with the metaphysicians insisting that a thing is what it is because of its substantial form, and the natural scientists insisting that a thing it what it is because of what it is made of. For several centuries this problem provoked many unsatisfactory solutions, remaining intractable right up to the time that natural philosophers began to abandon the Aristotelian worldview; indeed, its intractability may have contributed to their willingness to look elsewhere for a coherent theory of matter.Given the importance of this problem in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century commentaries on De generatione, this edition may frustrate readers who expect pedagogy along with philology. Readers will find where in the text the three manuscripts have column breaks, but will find no explanatory notes. The introduction surveys Buridan's life and ponders the sequence of events through which a medieval quaestiones commentary made [End Page 140] its way from the master in his lecture hall to the copyist's pen, but it offers no overview of the subject matter treated in the commentary itself.Buridan dealt with the problem of the elements in the longest question of his commentary, the twenty-second question of book 1, "Whether the substantial forms of elements remain in a mixed body." He found that incompatible consequences followed whether a mixed body's qualities arose from its constituent elements or from its substantial form. How, for example, could fire and water persist in a compound... (shrink)

A implementação e o uso das Tecnologias da Informação e da Comunicação na vida em geral, e aqui com destaque nas esferas do mundo do trabalho e da educação, têm acarretado mudanças significativas na vida das pessoas e nos cenários e estruturas sociais contemporâneos. Na pós-graduação essas mudanças vêm atingindo todos os envolvidos no que diz respeito à produção e veiculação do conhecimento e à necessidade de defrontar-se qualificadamente com o redimensionamento espácio-temporal proporcionado pela inserção das TIC nos processos de (...) estudo e trabalho. Neste artigo, decorrente de uma pesquisa vinculada a um Programa de Pós-graduação e realizada com doutorandos em Educação de uma universidade pública, analisamos como estes relacionam a categoria tempo com o uso das TIC para fazer frente ao desafio do processo do doutorado no contexto atual. Por meio de entrevistas com os participantes e à luz da análise de conteúdo, identificamos que os doutorandos estão adaptando-se à lógica do denominado produtivismo acadêmico, embora muitas vezes sentindo-se paralisados frente às exigências induzidas pelos órgãos de avaliação e fomento da PG. E nesse sentido, paradoxalmente afirmam encontrar nas TIC um importante aliado para a consecução do doutoramento, embora perpassado pela intensificação do tempo. Além disso, o próprio redimensionamento de tempos e espaços na consecução do doutoramento e no processo de pesquisa e escrita da tese com a mediação das TIC configura-se como uma “faca de dois gumes”, cujas contradições são inerentes ao modelo de regulação e avaliação da PG no Brasil. Finalmente, com base nos depoimentos dos entrevistados e nas relações entre produtividade, intensificação do tempo e mediação tecnológica nesse contexto da PG, questionamos a respeito da possibilidade de resgate da perspectiva omnilateral nesse processo formativo de futuros doutores. Palavras-chave: Doutorado. TICs. Tempo. Trabalho e educação. (shrink)