The aim of this paper is to analyze the transformation of a tradition of husbandry from moral and political philosophy to natural magic and technology. In the early 1640s there was a shift of approach in the Hartlib circle from the ecclesiastical peace projects to the more experimental and practical projects of husbandry. The discipline of vegetable philosophy defined a new field of interest which could connect the Baconian tradition of experimentation, the desire to compile natural histories, and (...) the dedication to the open character of knowledge and human benefits. I will claim that vegetable philosophy, although operational and practical, and based on the production of transferable technologies, is still grounded on a set of metaphysical assumptions. (shrink)

The volume analyzes the natural philosophical accounts and debates concerning the vegetative powers, namely nutrition, growth, and reproduction. While principally focusing on the early modern approaches to the lower functions of the soul, readers will discover the roots of these approaches back to the Ancient times, as the volume highlights the role of three strands that help shape the study of life in the Medieval and early modern natural philosophies. From late antiquity to the early modern period, the vegetative soul (...) and its cognate concepts have played a substantial role in specifying life, living functions, and living bodies, sometimes blurring the line between living and non-living nature, and, at other moments, resulting in a strong restriction of life to a mechanical system of operations and powers. Unearthing the history of the vegetative soul as a shrub of interconnected concepts, the 24 contributions of the volume fill a crucial gap in scholarship, ultimately outlining the importance of vegetal processes of incessant proliferation, generation, and organic growth as the roots of life in natural philosophical interpretations. (shrink)

The margins of philosophy are populated by non-human, non-animal living beings, including plants. While contemporary philosophers tend to refrain from raising ontological and ethical concerns with vegetal life, Michael Marder puts this life at the forefront of the current deconstruction of metaphysics. He identifies the existential features of plant behavior and the vegetal heritage of human thought so as to affirm the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the narrow confines of (...) instrumentality. Reconstructing the life of plants "after metaphysics," Marder focuses on their unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom. In his formulation, "plant-thinking" is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike. (shrink)

Rethinks the soul in plant-like terms rather than animal, drawing from nineteenth-century philosophy of nature.

A reader of previously published and new material (interviews with artists and theorists) devoted to the new and growing field of critical plant studies, and a reader that practices what it covers by arranging and intertwining its contents through a non-hierarchical and articulated manner that allow for different, alternate reading pathways.

This essay pursues the question of vegetal respiration in Presocratics’ doctrines in contrast to Aristotle’s categorical circumscription of this vital process to the blooded animals. It finds that epithelial respiration in DK31 B100 is central to Empedocles’ conception of plants’ breathing, linked to their fructification, deciduousness, and overall life preservation. It also discusses plants’ respiration in relation to their body temperature in Menestor, then, concludes by analyzing Democritus’ psychological doctrine, arguing that the intake of fiery atoms pertained to all (...) living beings, plants included. (shrink)

Consciousness in experimental subjects is typically inferred from reports and other forms of voluntary behaviour. A wealth of everyday experience confirms that healthy subjects do not ordinarily behave in these ways unless they are conscious. Investigation of consciousness in vegetative state patients has been based on the search for neural evidence that such broad functional capacities are preserved in some vegetative state patients. We call this the standard approach. To date, the results of the standard approach have suggested that some (...) vegetative state patients might indeed be conscious, although they fall short of being demonstrative. The fact that some vegetative state patients show evidence of consciousness according to the standard approach is remarkable, for the standard approach to consciousness is rather conservative, and leaves open the pressing question of how to ascertain whether patients who fail such tests are conscious or not. We argue for a cluster-based ‘natural kind’ methodology that is adequate to that task, both as a replacement for the approach that currently informs research into the presence or absence of consciousness in vegetative state patients and as a methodology for the science of consciousness more generally. 1. Introduction2. The Vegetative State3. The Standard Approach4. The Natural Kind Methodology5. Is Consciousness a Special Case? 5.1 Is consciousness a natural kind?5.2 A special obstacle?6. Conclusion. (shrink)

Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with human and nonhuman beings. Irigaray and Marder consider how the vegetal world contributes to human development by sustaining our breathing, nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies alive. This generative discussion points toward a more universal way of becoming human (...) that is embedded in the vegetal world. (shrink)

By denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy not only marginalizes plants but, inadvertently, confers on them a crucial role in the current transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. From the position of absolute exteriority and heteronomy, vegetation accomplishes a living reversal of metaphysical values and points toward the collapse of hierarchical dualisms.

In ancient Greek ecological thought, vegetality is the most basic ground of life. It is followed by animality and rationality as increasingly active, self-aware forms of life. An ontology of forms of life need not justify a hierarchy among actual living beings, but in practice it often does. This paper shows how the poetic representation of plants resists this slippage. Poetry offers human beings an ecstasis from their own animality so that they can apprehend their participation in the vegetality of (...) living beings as a whole. (shrink)

Thinking of the animal-as-non-human is an idea that does not solely belong to a myopic yet ameliorable moment of Western philosophy’s past. It is central to, even constitutive of that past. It remains characteristic of its present and will likely dominate the character of philosophy—of thinking’s—foreseeable future. My contention is that thinking-difference has not, and cannot happen because of thinking-the-animal, and this is precisely due to the conceptual companionship that animality has played between the human and the non-human. (...) This paper explores thinking otherwise-thananimality through the activation of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of becoming-plant. Plant life is genuinely heterogeneous to animal life. In this paper I explore the complex phenomenon of plant communication. Thinking through and activating the vital difference expressed by plant signalling can play a role in the activation of real difference in thought, not merely its companionable extension. (shrink)

According to Descartes, vegetative and sensitive activities, which in the Aristotelian tradition were considered dependent on the soul, are pure effects of corporeal dispositions. What is, however, the relationship between this doctrine and Descartes’s metaphysical claim in the Meditations, namely, that the mind is the only cause of thought? In the Meditations, Descartes does not provide a doctrine of vegetative and sensitive functions, and he does not even establish the canonic Cartesian thesis that they are not dependent on the soul. (...) In claiming that the lowest functions cannot be attributed to the soul, the Second Meditation is not making an ontological point. Nevertheless, in spite of this, the Meditations teach us something very important about the lowest functions: that both vegetative and sensitive functions depend on the soul is not, and never will be, a necessarily true proposition. (shrink)

Galen of Pergamum developed a new notion of the vegetative soul as seated in the liver, in a synthetic appropriation of Platonic tripartition, Aristotelian hylomorphism, Hippocratic elemental theory and Hellenistic science. The traditional analogy between plant and human being receives a firmer grounding in Galen, making the model of the plant more prominent than ever in the discussion of the vegetative soul. While most of the particular functions of the vegetative soul in human beings are well-defined by Galen, its generative (...) and formative powers remain unexplained, since the stuff to which we attribute these powers seems to lack intelligence. (shrink)

Preface : plant theory? -- The first birth of biopower : from plant to animal life in Foucault -- Thinking plants, with Aristotle and Heidegger -- Animal and plant, life and world in Derrida, or, The plant and the sovereign -- From the world to the territory : vegetable life in Deleuze and Guattari, or, What is a rhizome? -- Coda : what difference does it make?

This paper examines neuroethics as a discipline in which ongoing formation and development in both ethics and medicine are shedding new light on the care of patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. From the perspective of the Catholic moral tradition, the author proposes that ethics and recent developments in functional neuroimaging form a complementary relationship that gives rise to an ethical imperative: because we can care for patients in a vegetative state, we should do so. This imperative for (...) care finds a particular expression in the ethical debate in light of the 2004 statement of Pope John Paul II that assisted nutrition and hydration for patients in a vegetative state should be considered, in principle, ordinary care. What do neurology and developments in scientific research teach us about patients in a vegetative state? Neuroethics is providing a unique opportunity for both medicine and ethics to discover more completely not only who we are as human beings but also how we should act. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.3 (Autumn 2012): 477–488. (shrink)

Apres avoir introduit les concepts de base de Fūdo, je propose une interpretation du texte problematisee autour du statut de la vegetation. Il s’agira de montrer pourquoi et comment la place que tient la vegetation joue un role mediateur fondamental en tant que principe de premiere importance, y compris et surtout ici pour la vie humaine decrite par Watsuji. Ce faisant, l’objectif est double. D’une part, montrer, a la suite d’Augustin Berque, la coherence de la visee mesologique initiale de l’auteur (...) en donnant un fondement theorique a ses exemples vegetaux. D’autre part, se recentrer sur le role mesologique de la vegetation permet de relativiser la place du climat et donc du determinisme environnemental souvent surevalues dans beaucoup de traductions et commentaires de Fūdo. (shrink)

In this chapter, I investigate the metaphysical assumptions that medieval thinkers considered necessary in order to integrate the vegetative powers and processes into their conception of human beings as composed of a material body and an immaterial soul. My aim is to show that vegetative powers and processes are central to the late medieval debate on faculty psychology and on the unity or plurality of substantial forms. The chapter has two parts. First, I present three different accounts of the ontological (...) status of the vegetative powers in relation to the body and the soul, as found in Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and John Buridan. All three maintain that the vegetative powers belong to the soul but disagree as to whether they are identical with it or somehow distinct from it, especially when the soul in question is immaterial. Second, I investigate how medieval thinkers accounted for the metaphysics behind the operations of the vegetative powers in human beings, who are endowed with immaterial souls, in particular when it comes to procreation and digestion. A pressing problem for the vegetative powers of human beings is how they can produce a new substance when this composite is supposed to include an immaterial soul which is not naturally generated. Regarding procreation, one can distinguish two different approaches: dispositional generation of material conditions and substantial generation of the body. A similar problem for human beings arises in nutrition and growth once this process is taken to be some kind of substantial change, namely, the corruption of food and the production of new parts of the living being. Two accounts can be distinguished: “transmateriation” of the matter of food into the nourished body and generation of parts of the body. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine Francis Glisson’s theory of perception insofar as it concerns the lowest class of living beings: plants. Plants have a special status, they are located between inanimate objects and animals in the hierarchy of being. Unlike the former, they are organic, but unlike the latter they are unconscious. Peculiar to Glisson is the claim that vegetative organization requires self-referential perception. In light of traditional epistemology, this claim may sound puzzling, because we tend to (...) associate self-representation with conscious thought. In order to make sense of Glisson’s self-referential, but unconscious perceptions, the first part of the paper investigates the role of perception in the vegetative process of organization. The second part is a comparative study on two ways of drawing the distinction between unconscious perceptions and conscious sensations. The first one is the Cartesian approach as outlined by Antoine Arnauld in the early 1680s, the second one is Glisson’s theory. In light of the comparison it is argued that Glisson’s is a higher order theory of sensation in which the phenomenon of consciousness requires the delimitation of the all-inclusive, self-referential nature of perception. (shrink)

The historical development of a field of human knowledge progresses like the solution of a jig-saw puzzle, the full extent of which is completely unknown. What begins as an ocean may become only a lake; what starts as a grove of trees may develop into a forest. As study advances through the decades, the situation is repeatedly surveyed and the interpretation of the whole is modified to accord with the added information. For these reasons, conceptions and generalizations periodically undergo alteration, (...) as effectively stated and discussed by Cooper. Universal conformity in such conceptions is of course hardly to be expected in matters that deal largely with speculation rather than with simple experimental data. (shrink)

Plants are silent, still, or move slowly; we do not have the sense that they accompany us, or even perceive us. But is there something that plants are telling us? Is there something about how they live and connect, how they relate to the world and other plants that can teach us about ecological thinking, about ethics and politics? Grounded in Thoreau's ecology and in contemporary plant studies, Thoreau and Vegetal Thought offers answers to those questions by pondering such (...) concepts as co-dependence, the continuity of life forms, relationality, cohabitation, porousness, fragility, the openness of beings to incessant modification by other beings and phenomena, patience, waiting, slowness and receptivity. (shrink)

René Descartes’ mechanization of living activities lays bare a glaring lacuna that concerns vegetative functions, such as nutrition, generation, and growth: his cardiovascular framework affects any exhaustive explanation of these activities. When he mentions a mechanical vegetative power in his 1641 correspondence with Henricus Regius, this definition is unspecified, although it may be correlated to a few posthumous bio-medical notes. Descartes’ mechanization of the vegetative soul remains puzzling. Early Cartesian scholars were thus obliged to fill this lacuna to produce a (...) more exhaustive physiology. In this chapter, after reconstructing Descartes’ own position in L’Homme and in his manuscripts, I explore the positions of Regius, Louis de La Forge, and Florent Schuyl, who dealt with Descartes’ medical texts and physiological doctrine through various perspectives. Yet, while building a mechanization of vegetation upon Descartes’ philosophy, their interpretations of a mechanical vegetative power uncover shortcomings, weaknesses, and failures. (shrink)

Many discussions of the moral status of “mindless beings” such as the permanently comatose, the dead, trees, and human fetuses seem to take for granted the thesis that it is improper to appeal to emotions to establish the fundamental distinction between “persona” (beings capableof rights “in their own right”) and “things” (beings not capable of rights except in some fictional or iIlusory sense). Persons are persons, however we may feel about them.That thesis seems to be a major obstacle to any (...) nonutilitarian account of the personhood of mindless beings.I argue that the thesis of independence is true, if at aIl, only for one class of persons (“rational agents”). Beyond that class, our emotional response to a being can be relevant to its moral status. Acting on some consideration (or believing something in virtue of it) can be rational inthe “constitutive”, “regulative”, or “associative” sense. A consideration is a good reason if it is rational in any of these senses. The importance of this claim is shown by briefly examining Feinberg’s weIl-known argument that it is a conceptual truth that mindless beings are incapable ofrights. His argument assumes that our emotions cannot be rational in the appropriate sense and coIlapses without that assumption. (shrink)

Many discussions of the moral status of “mindless beings” such as the permanently comatose, the dead, trees, and human fetuses seem to take for granted the thesis that it is improper to appeal to emotions to establish the fundamental distinction between “persona” (beings capableof rights “in their own right”) and “things” (beings not capable of rights except in some fictional or iIlusory sense). Persons are persons, however we may feel about them.That thesis seems to be a major obstacle to any (...) nonutilitarian account of the personhood of mindless beings.I argue that the thesis of independence is true, if at aIl, only for one class of persons (“rational agents”). Beyond that class, our emotional response to a being can be relevant to its moral status. Acting on some consideration (or believing something in virtue of it) can be rational inthe “constitutive”, “regulative”, or “associative” sense. A consideration is a good reason if it is rational in any of these senses. The importance of this claim is shown by briefly examining Feinberg’s weIl-known argument that it is a conceptual truth that mindless beings are incapable ofrights. His argument assumes that our emotions cannot be rational in the appropriate sense and coIlapses without that assumption. (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)

The destruction of animality that takes place in Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics goes as far as to destroy the very idea of an animal life as distinct from plant life. “Life”, as Heidegger says in Being and Time, is “a specific mode of being”, that is to say, as the 1929-30 lecture course will show, that it is “the mode of being of animals and plants”. Conceived as a mere organism that does “nothing more than to live”, the animal (...) find itself deprived of world, living in a vegetative state, in a kind of stupor (Benommenheit). The method of the ontology of life – announced in Being and Time as a “privative interpretation” – will reveal itself as a biological reduction: the strategy is to find functional equivalences for all that, in animals, resemble in any way what we find in humans. The life of animals is not a life, but biological processes. The traditional faculties associated with animal life – movement, perception and irrational desire (i.e. impulsion) – will be held as properly human, letting the animals a form of life deprived of signification, of possibility, of world. (shrink)

Han Kang's 2007 novel The Vegetarian, published in English translation in 2015, tells a story of one woman's refusal to eat meat. Yeong-hye's refusal comes from her desire to eschew the intersecting violence of patriarchy and carnism, which gradually reveals an underlying psychosis and drive towards self-attrition. Because of the central motifs of bodily transgression and self-abnegation in the novel, critics have compered Han Kang's Yeong-hye to Frantz Kafka's Gregor Samsa or the hunger artist. Just as the hunger artist seeks (...) seclusion from human sociality in the space of his vacuous interiority, so does Yeong-hye sequester herself from the gaze of others in her visions of... (shrink)

Patients in a vegetative state/ unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (VS/UWS) pose ethical dilemmas to those involved. Many conflicts occur between professionals and families of these patients. In the Netherlands physicians are supposed to withdraw life sustaining treatment once recovery is not to be expected. Yet these patients have shown to survive sometimes for decades. The role of the families is thought to be important. The aim of this study was to make an inventory of the professional perspective on conflicts in long-term (...) care of patients in VS/UWS. A qualitative study of transcripts on 2 Moral Deliberations (MD’s) in 2 cases of patients in VS/UWS in long-term care facilities. Six themes emerged: 1) Vision on VS/UWS; 2) Treatment and care plan; 3) Impact on relationships; 4) Feelings/attitude; 5) Communication; 6) Organizational aspects. These themes are related to professionals and to what families had expressed to the professionals. We found conflicts as well as contradictory feelings and thoughts to be a general feature in 4 of these themes, both in professionals and families. Conflicts were found in several actors: within families concerning all 6 themes, in nurse teams concerning the theme treatment and care plan, and between physicians concerning all 6 themes. Different visions, different expectations and hope on recovery, deviating goals and contradictory feelings/thoughts in families and professionals can lead to conflicts over a patient with VS/UWS. Key factors to prevent or solve such conflicts are a carefully established diagnosis, clarity upon visions, uniformity in treatment goals and plans, an open and empathic communication, expertise and understanding the importance of contradictory feelings/thoughts. Management should bridge conflicts and support their staff, by developing expertise, by creating stability and by facilitating medical ethical discourses. Shared compassion for the patient might be a key to gain trust and bridge the differences from non-shared to shared decision making. (shrink)

has been put forth by Rolston, which leads to respect for the irreversibly comatose by virtue of the residual biological (objective) life. By comparing objective and subjective life, he develops a naturalistic principle which he contrasts with the humanistic norm of contemporary medical ethics. He claims there are clinical applications which would necessarily follow. A critique of this viewpoint is presented here, which begins with an analysis of what might be of value in spontaneous objective life. A measure of the (...) moral worth of simple objective life is attempted by means of comparison with our attitudes toward animals. Finally, some of the clinical applications suggested by Rolston are reviewed. Except for euthanasia, there appear to be few clinical situations where the naturalistic principle helps in problem solving. Keywords: naturalistic principle, value of life, irreversibly comatose CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (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)

In the controversy that arose between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Georg Ernst Stahl following the publication of the latter’s Theoria medica vera, both theoreticians strove to distance themselves from what they took to be the classical conception of the vegetative soul, while relating and partly reducing their opponent’s doctrine to it. I shall first attempt to establish their respective meanings for such a soul and the reasons why they would challenge the relevance of that notion for physiology. I shall then (...) try to show how they nevertheless integrated explanatory functions equivalent to those attributed to that metaphysical entity into the theoretical frameworks they proposed and favoured. As a consequence of alternative interpretations of this kind, eighteenth-century physiologists will tend to link vegetative life either with “organic mechanism” or with various kinds of “vital principle,” akin to Stahl’s anima. (shrink)

Long-term vegetation dynamics based on paleo-pollen data display transient behaviour, often alternating in phase between predominant determinism and predominant 'turbulence', when viewed as a trajectory in a multivariate phase space. Given this, the metaphor of vegetation dynamics as a 'flowing stream', first introduced by Cooper in his classic 1926 paper entitled "The fundamentals of vegetation change", is re-examined and revealed to be not only useful, but strikingly realistic. Vegetation dynamic theory is reviewed and classic theories are found to reflect reality (...) poorly. It is suggested that vegetation dynamics is a far from equilibrium system, and that the application of nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory is appropriate. (shrink)

This article analyzes the treatment of vegetative powers in Nicolaus Taurellus’s critical response to Andrea Cesalpino. Taurellus’s interest in this topic derives from larger metaphysical and theological concerns. His concern is that Cesalpino’s view that vegetative powers are due to a divine principle of activity inherent in natural particulars leads to a version of substance monism that is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of creation. Taurellus’s critique can best be understood within the context of his defense of an immaterialist account (...) of the basic constituents of reality, which is connected with an emergentist account of the origin of vegetative powers. (shrink)

Some vegetative state patients show fMRI responses similar to those of healthy controls when instructed to perform mental imagery tasks. Many authors have argued that this provides evidence that such patients are in fact conscious, as response to commands requires intentional agency. I argue for an alternative reading, on which responsive patients have a deficit similar to that seen in severe forms of akinetic mutism. Akinetic mutism is marked by the inability to form and maintain intentions to act. Responsive patients (...) are likely still conscious. However, the route to this conclusion does not support attributions of intentional agency. I argue that aspects of consciousness, rather than broad diagnostic categories, are the more appropriate target of empirical investigation. Investigating aspects of consciousness provides a better method for investigating profound disorders of consciousness. 1 Introduction2 Responses in the Vegetative State2.1 The imaging evidence2.2 The need for models3 Responsive Patients and Akinetic Mutism3.1 Akinetic mutism3.2 Akinetic mutism as a deficit in intentions3.3 Arguments for the link3.4 Interim conclusion4 Other Models4.1 A deficit in ability?4.2 Modular intentions?5 Consciousness and Method5.1 Are they conscious?5.2 Aspects versus levels. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article is a meditation, developed in dialogue with the thought of twelfth-century German mystic and saint Hildegard of Bingen, on the various senses of the verge. Besides connoting a temporal and spatial edge, the verge unites such apparently disparate things as virginity and virility, vigor and virtue, veracity and viriditas – Hildegard’s original term for the vegetal principle of “greening green,” allowing for the self-reproduction of all finite existence. I show how, in the shadow of vegetality, the verge (...) sparks a series of sudden reversals in which, figured as “the greenest branch,” Virgin Mary is imbued with a greater strength than the Flower-Child she carries, and plant life is endowed with vigor animating the rest of creation. (shrink)

My paper explores the extent to which More’s ‘Spirit of Nature’ and Cudworth’s ‘Plastic Nature’ incorporated the functions of the Aristotelian vegetable soul, and how far, if at all, each was indebted to Aristotle. I argue that, although, on the matter of vegetable life there is some overlap between the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative soul and those ascribed by Cudworth to Plastic Nature and More to the Spirit of Nature, Cudworth and More were not simply reviving Aristotle in new (...) dress. Both certainly drew on Aristotle when formulating their hypotheses, but these have a much broader range of functions than the Aristotelian vegetative soul. Even among those functions which concern the basics of organic life, both hypotheses have affinities with other the well-developed medico-physiological traditions of the late Renaissance. And, although this type of formative spirit is often compared to the Platonic World Soul, both hypotheses are indebted as much, if not more to Stoicism. (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)

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)

Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of plants-in lived experience; in (...) landscape painting; in cultivation and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities? Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey's phenomenology of place and Michael Marder's plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic constitution of plant edges or a child's engagement with moss and the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees. This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our understanding and experience of place more broadly. (shrink)

Plant succession is a phenomenon ascribed to vegetation dynamics at the scale of the plant community. The study of plant succession implies the analysis of the species involved and their relationships. Depending on the research done, the characteristics of trees have been studied according to either static, dimensional or partial approaches. We have revised the principal theories of succession, the methods of describing structure and development of tree and relationship established between tree species' attributes and their successional status. During studies (...) of succession, we propose that the profile of plant species be completed by including the organizational attributes of their structure as well as their development dynamics. We suggest an approach to the architecture that gives a general overview of the mode of development, revealing, among other things, that a limited number of architectural models may be found in nature. We hypothesize that community dynamics, in succession, may to a certain degree arise from the dynamic nature of plant development. This line of reasoning is in accordance with the current school of thought on process structuralism. (shrink)