Recent work in the philosophy of biology argues that we must rethink the biological individual beyond the boundary of the species, given that a key part of our essential functioning is carried out by the bacteria in our intestines in a way that challenges any strictly genetic account of what is involved for the biological human. The gut is a kind of ambiguous other within our understanding of ourselves, particularly when we also consider the status of gastro-intestinal disorders. Hegel offers (...) us theoretical tools to describe and understand our relationship to our gut. His description of our selves as continually mediated through otherness is strikingly compatible with the kind of structure contemporary biology presents us with. His accounts of digestion and habit, contextualized by his logic, help point toward an understanding of selfhood as porous and yet still capable of being sufficiently unified for us to make sense of ourselves, one which allows us to acknowledge otherness within us while still having enough unity for agency. (shrink)

The Stoic Epictetus famously criticizeshis students for studying Stoicism as ‘mere theory’ and encouraged them to add training to their educational program. This is made all the more interesting by the fact that Epictetus, as a Stoic, was committed to notion that wisdom is sufficient to be virtuous, so theory should be all that’s required to achieve virtue. How are we then to make sense of Epictetus criticism of an overreliance on theory, and his insistence on adding training? This paper (...) argues that this tension can be resolved through an appeal to the metaphor of ‘digesting theory’. Epictetus discusses the digestion of theory in three parts of his existent work. While the use of digestion as a metaphor for moral progress in Epictetus has been noted, an explanation as to exactly what this process consists of has yet to be provided. This paper attempts to provide such an account. I argue that digestion consists of assimilating what we have learnt conceptually, at the level of general principles, into specific beliefs concerning existent objects. I argue further that this process of digestion can only be achieved through what Epictetus calls training (askesis). (shrink)

The initial relationships between organisms leading to endosymbiosis and the first eukaryote are currently a topic of hot debate. Here, I present a theory that offers a gradual scenario in which the origins of phagocytosis and mitochondria are intertwined in such a way that the evolution of one would not be possible without the other. In this scenario, the premitochondrial bacterial symbiont became initially associated with a protophagocytic host on the basis of cooperation to kill prey with symbiont‐produced toxins and (...) reactive oxygen species (ROS). Subsequently, the cooperation was focused on the digestion stage, through the acidification of the protophagocytic cavities via exportation of protons produced by the aerobic respiration of the symbiont. The host gained an improved phagocytic capacity and the symbiont received organic compounds from prey. As the host gradually lost its membrane energetics to develop lysosomal digestion, respiration was centralized in the premitochondrial symbiont for energy production for the consortium. (shrink)

Rising energy costs, increasing herd sizes, and other structural changes affecting the New York dairy industry may make farmers receptive to new energy production technologies. Anaerobic digestion represents a possible benefit to farmers by reducing odor while producing methane for electricity. However, current digester designs are for herd sizes of 300 or more cows, with significant economies of scale, so smaller operators may have little interest in the technology. Moreover, without a favorable policy environment and reliable grant programs, the (...) initial investments required for digester installation might deter operators. One solution to these issues may be community digesters, which are centrally located facilities that accept manure from multiple farms. Data from a survey of New York dairy farmers were used to assess farmers’ interest in community digesters. In general, interest was associated with power generation outcomes and reservations about organic farming practices; advocates might encourage their use among smaller conventional farm operators looking for new sources of profit and diversification. (shrink)

This essay returns to Jacques Derrida’s 1975 essay, “Economimesis,” to account for its unacknowledged Marxist language. Focusing on Derrida’s analysis of the mouth in the Critique of Judgment, this...

Nutrition-sensitive agriculture has emerged as a major development paradigm that works to diversify crops and diets throughout the Global South in order to improve nutritional outcomes. Drawing on a conceptual framework from political ecologies of health that looks at political economic factors, social discourse, and embodied, material experiences of food, I analyze qualitative and ethnographic data from an integrated NSA intervention in Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, India. The analysis shows that while embodied experiences of differing rice varieties were central to (...) research participants’ conceptions of bodily health, mainstream NSA metrics had trouble ‘seeing’ these relations in meaningful ways. Moreover, although material experiences of rice cultivation and consumption anchored participants’ rice preferences, structural economic realities along with notions of social identity were always interwoven. Yet, while villagers expressed divergent perceptions around how the different rice cultivars shaped their bodily health, agricultural officers tended to view rice experiences as a product of culture, rather than as material and socio-ecological food-body interactions. In sum, this paper argues more deeply engaging with the political economic, socially symbolic, and embodied ways that communities relate to food production and consumption would allow NSA research to develop more grounded and inclusive understandings of agriculture-nutrition linkages. (shrink)

A companion paper explored the role of intuition in the genesis of an alternative theory for the secretion of pancreatic digestive enzymes, looking through the lens of three philosophers/historians of science. Gerald Holton, the last scholar, proposed that scientific imagination is shaped by a number of thematic presuppositions, which function largely below awareness. They come in pairs of opposites that alternately gain cultural preeminence. The current paper examines three thematic presuppositions inherent to both the generally accepted model for digestive enzyme (...) secretion and most consciousness-centered views of higher-level cognition—discreteness, reduction, and simplicity. Since they often build on each other, together they are referred to as the simplicity worldview . Also considered are the three opposite thematic assumptions inherent to both the alternative model for digestive enzyme secretion and intuition-friendly views of higher-level cognition—the continuum, holism, and complexity—together referred to as the complexity worldview . The article highlights the potential importance to scientific knowledge of this currently less favored worldview. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 31, Issue 1, pp 1 - 24 Three student digests of uncertain origin have been identified among the Hobbes manuscripts now at Chatsworth. This article describes the physical composition and contents of the manuscripts, identifies their textual sources, adds two previously unnoticed digests to the gathering, and offers some suggestions about their character, likely dates, and provenance.

The digester, invented by Denis Papin in the 1680s, was a rudimentary pressure cooker used to soften hard bodies by boiling them at high pressure. In this paper, I propose a reassessment of Papin's work on the digester, arguing that his research was located at the intersection of the chemical laboratory and cooking practice. I then examine cases from the eighteenth-century European circulation of the instrument in Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands in order to showcase the different practices (...) in which the digester was embedded, including chemical research, philanthropic projects to feed the destitute, and proposals for the improvement of home cooking. The digester's history represents a key episode for demonstrating the intertwined nature of natural-philosophical research and the practice of economy or ‘thrift’. All users of the digester engaged in a rationalization of its functions through quantification, not only to fulfil a concern for precision but also to display the device's potential to reform practical daily life. The digester could save time and fuel, reduce material waste, make cooking easier and foster collective meal preparation for the needy. (shrink)

In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel describes at length and in detail the particular workings of animal digestion and excretion, referring to the empirical research of his day (Berzelius, Spallanzani, Traviranus). By becoming engaged in the scientific disputes and insights of the time—regarding, for example, the mechanical versus chemical nature of digestion, immediate digestive assimilation and the chemical composition of feces—Hegel arrives at the novel idea that what the animal excretes as superfluous is its own particular entanglement with inorganic otherness. (...) The animal’s subsequent feeling of triumph and satisfaction constitutes the affirmation of individual purposiveness, a form of immediate ideality that Hegel presents as animal subjectivity. (shrink)

Mérleg is an interesting quarterly selection of articles of general interest translated from the major Western languages into Hungarian. It is a Catholic publication for a general intellectual public and it contains besides the longer studies review articles, reviews, interviews and also short summaries. The most important articles of the two issues we are reviewing: A. Greeley, "The Sacred and the Psychedelic"; A. Plé, "The affective life of the consecrated celibate"; K. Franke, "Apology for the protection of the unborn life"; (...) "Basic issues of the Abortion Problem"; "Catechesis according to the Council"; R. Schnackenburg, "The birth of Christ without legends and Myths"; P. Caspers, "The role of the Church in Asia"; C. Aguiar, "Latin-American Catholicism"; "The Memory of Mauriac." The very difficulty of publishing in Hungarian a theologically orientated digest makes this selection dramatically sparing and it seems to give us a more coherent and more essential view of the "happenings" of the West than many of the reviews of America, France or Germany.--M. J. V. (shrink)

With an avid attention to the valuing of embodiment and a championing of the re-emergence of the body as site for discussions of knowledge and knowing, this essay shares aspects of my practice that engage a performative, haptic, situated engagement with the body through the artist’s book. The motivation for the creation of my bookworks was an interest in manifesting situated knowing and embodied ways of becoming. Engaging form, materiality, and bodily history, my artists’ books explore the processes and metaphors (...) of digestion and in one example, mindfulness practice. In libraries and collections with links to health, my artists’ books can be experienced in teaching and research contexts to examine the body, health, illness and wellbeing. This essay focuses on my books which communicate embodied knowledge in several ways: through phenomenological writing to give expression to my irritable bowel syndrome and how it impacts on my teaching practice in Reflection on Digestion; through bodily material of Entrail Troyen; through the image of the digestive system in On Innards, Reflection on Digestion, and Entrail Troyen, particularly the concertina form emulating the undulations of the intestines; and through images of found objects that resemble the bowels in Huwawa in the Everyday. (shrink)

Fermentation is a cornerstone phenomenon in Cartesian physiology, accounting for processes such as digestion or blood formation. I argue that the previously unrecognized conceptual tension between the terms ‘fermentation’ and ‘concoction’ reflects Descartes's efforts towards a novel, more thoroughly mechanistic theory of physiology, set up against both Galenism and chymistry. Similarities with chymistry as regards fermentation turn out either epistemologically superficial, or based on shared earlier sources. Descartes tentatively employs ‘fermentation’ as a less teleological alternative to ‘concoction’, later renouncing the (...) explicit use of the term, possibly to avoid chymical overtones. However, his continued use of analogies with fermentative processes in the natural world and in winemaking, coupled with a strong ontological commitment (the stance that the physiological processes are actual fermentations), leads to a reintroduction of natural teleology in his medical system, which I argue may be understood in an Aristotelian sense of ‘simple necessity’. The paper reveals a more nuanced account of Cartesian fermentative medicine, delineating some of its tensions with regard to chymistry as they play out in the dynamics of fermentation and concoction, and linking the analogies to fermentation processes to the difficulties in erasing teleology altogether. (shrink)

The most extreme form of legal realism says that judicial decisions depend on what judges had for breakfast. It is unclear whether any of the American realists really claimed anything of that sort. Sometimes Jerome Frank is charged with that extreme view, which is not surprising given that Frank is generally considered to be the most radical, skeptical and cynic among those realists. It has been said in fact that critics of American legal realism have promoted a “Frankification” of this (...) movem.. (shrink)

“The Draft UNCITRAL Digest and Beyond” is one of the most useful single volumes available on the CISG. It includes the full text of the draft “UNCITRAL Digest” which catalogues the cases and arbitral awards to date that have interpreted and applied the CISG on an article by article basis. “The Digest and Beyond” includes also commentary by eminent CISG scholars that addresses issues not yet considered in the cases. With more than 1000 decisions applying the CISG in courts and (...) arbitral tribunals around the world, the UNCITRAL Secretariat charged five CISG experts from a variety of regions with the task of creating a digest of CISG case law. “The Digest and Beyond” includes the draft “UNCITRAL Digest”, even before it is released officially by UNCITRAL. It also goes where the authors of the Digest were not allowed to go, given the narrow mandate within which the drafters were asked to work. Its chapters build upon the work of the “UNCITRAL Digest”. The Digest describes the reasoning and results of existing CISG cases; in “The Digest and Beyond”, the Digest authors analyze those cases, and discuss issues that have not yet arisen in the case law. Thus, in many ways, “The Digest and Beyond” provides scholarship that can direct future cases in areas that have not yet been considered by courts and arbitrators as well as in areas in which contradictory court decisions exist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore how the cosmic soul works and how it accomplishes its providential and demiurgic tasks in Chrysippus’ system. Drawing on (i) the analogy Chrysippus establishes between the individuum and the cosmos and (ii) biological and medical theories of respiration, digestion, and pulse, I will show that the movements of Chrysippus’ cosmic soul reproduce the processes of digestion, pulse, and respiration at a cosmic level. My claim is that Chrysippus, in addition to adopting Praxagoras’ (...) notion that inhaled air nourishes pneuma—well established in the scholarship—appropriated Aristotle’s complex mechanism of respiration and digestion based on the teleological role of cold air, crucial for preserving vital heat. So understood, Chrysippus’ application of biological notions to cosmology allows him to endow the active principle with effective causation throughout the cosmos. (shrink)

While Sartre scholars cannot fairly be described as being opposed to science, they have, for the most part, stayed aloof. The field of psychology, of course, has been an exception. Sartre himself felt compelled to present his own existential psychoanalysis by marking the parallels and differences between his position and traditional approaches, particularly the Freudian. The same is true with respect to his concept of bad faith and of emotional behavior. Scholars have followed his lead with richly productive results. But (...) we may note that the debate has centered on psychic and therapeutic issues, aspects of what Sartre called le vécu or lived experience, rather than on the findings of cognitive science or neuroscience. Although all existentialists and phenomenologists accept as a central tenet the fact that consciousness is embodied, there has been virtually no concern with the biological substratum. But the study of consciousness cannot be restricted within its own narrow confines—unlike, say, Greek grammar, which can be learned without reference to the rules of Arabic. At some point, there must be established an organic foundation for the behavior of the conscious organism. (shrink)

While Sartre scholars cannot fairly be described as being opposed to science, they have, for the most part, stayed aloof. The field of psychology, of course, has been an exception. Sartre himself felt compelled to present his own existential psychoanalysis by marking the parallels and differences between his position and traditional approaches, particularly the Freudian. The same is true with respect to his concept of bad faith and of emotional behavior. Scholars have followed his lead with richly productive results. But (...) we may note that the debate has centered on psychic and therapeutic issues, aspects of what Sartre called le vécu or lived experience, rather than on the findings of cognitive science or neuroscience. Although all existentialists and phenomenologists accept as a central tenet the fact that consciousness is embodied, there has been virtually no concern with the biological substratum. But the study of consciousness cannot be restricted within its own narrow confines—unlike, say, Greek grammar, which can be learned without reference to the rules of Arabic. At some point, there must be established an organic foundation for the behavior of the conscious organism. (shrink)

While Sartre scholars cannot fairly be described as being opposed to science, they have, for the most part, stayed aloof. The field of psychology, of course, has been an exception. Sartre himself felt compelled to present his own existential psychoanalysis by marking the parallels and differences between his position and traditional approaches, particularly the Freudian. The same is true with respect to his concept of bad faith and of emotional behavior. Scholars have followed his lead with richly productive results. But (...) we may note that the debate has centered on psychic and therapeutic issues, aspects of what Sartre called le vécu or lived experience, rather than on the findings of cognitive science or neuroscience. Although all existentialists and phenomenologists accept as a central tenet the fact that consciousness is embodied, there has been virtually no concern with the biological substratum. But the study of consciousness cannot be restricted within its own narrow confines—unlike, say, Greek grammar, which can be learned without reference to the rules of Arabic. At some point, there must be established an organic foundation for the behavior of the conscious organism. (shrink)

A mass balance based model has been derived to represent the dynamical behavior of the ecosystem contained in an anaerobic digester. The model considers two bacterial populations: acidogenic and methanogenic bacteria. It forms the basis for the design of a software sensor considering both a model of the biological system and on-line gaseous measurements. The software sensor computes the concentration of inorganic carbon and volatile fatty acids (VFA) in the digester. Another software sensor is dedicated to the estimation (...) of the bacterial biomasses. The predictions of the software sensors for a real experiment are very close to the actual off-line measurements. The software sensors monitor the accumulation of VFA and thus very early detect a destabilization of the digester due to overloading. The presented methodology demonstrates the usefulness of advanced monitoring techniques for an improved understanding of the internal working of a biological system. (shrink)

The text opening the 'Great Peace Part' ('Taiping bu') in the Ming Taoist Canon, the Great Peace Scripture Digest (Taiping jing chao) is widely confused with the famous Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing) which follows it in the Canon. The first full analysis and reassessment of the Great Peace Scripture Digest, this paper reviews the textual morphology of its ancient and modern editions, discusses current hypotheses concerning its date and authorship, and investigates its literary structure and form, pointing to clusters (...) of prosodic patterns. Light is shed on strata of diachronic origin coexisting in the text, which should not be regarded as being the product of an inconstant solitary compiler, but rather as the conflation of shortened renditions of the Great Peace Scripture perhaps dating to the Tang and pre-Song or early Song eras. A full linear analysis of the text, including a concordance, completes the literary study. (shrink)

This article investigates the origin and the earliest, formative period of one of the major concepts in post-classical Chinese medicine, the concept of phlegm, tan 痰. It is the first study that examines both Chinese- and Sanskrit-language sources in seeking to answer the question whether the development of the concept of phlegm in Chinese medicine is owed to Indic influences. Following traditional Chinese scholarship, it argues that the initial emergence of the substance tan 痰, which later was to become “phlegm,” (...) should be understood as an indigenous development from the fluid yin 飲. The subsequent formation and development of the concept of phlegm in Chinese medicine, however, was influenced by Āyurveda. The influence hinges on the coincidence of Indic and Chinese intuitions about digestion. Previous scholarship on early Chinese Buddhist translations of Indic terms for phlegm and the tridoṣa has either claimed that variations in the terminology betrayed the Chinese translators’ poor understanding of Āyurvedic concepts or that the translators creatively manipulated the terminology with a view to the cultural background of their intended audiences. By contrast, this article argues that the early terminology the Chinese translators crafted was highly accurate and faithful to their Indic source texts. It shows, by going back to the Indic classics, that the variations in Chinese terminology reflect an ancient and long-forgotten temporal shift in the perception of humors in India itself. (shrink)

Ayurveda is a traditional system of healthcare that is native to India and has a rich documented literature of its own. Most of the historians agree that the documentation of core Ayurveda literature took place approximately in between 400 BCE and 200 CE, while acknowledging that the roots of its theoretical framework can be traced back to a much earlier period. For multiple reasons many significant contributions of Ayurveda literature to various streams of biological and medical sciences have remained under-recognized (...) while recounting the historical milestones of development. This is true in the context of the physiology of digestion and metabolism too. In this communication we try to reconstruct a picture of the processes of digestion and metabolism as had been understood by ancient Ayurveda scholars. Though this understanding was primitive and insufficient in many ways, we argue that this deserves to be documented and acknowledged. To help with grasping the importance of these contributions, we juxtapose them with the corresponding insights pertaining to this subject reported by prominent western scientists. The major contributions of Ayurveda that have been recounted in this paper are those related to the description of three distinct phases of digestion (Avasthapaka), multiple sets of transformative entities acting at different levels of metabolism (Agni), and the roles ascribed to various internal and external factors in executing these physiological functions. (shrink)