scholarly journals The Ecological Literacies of St. Hildegard of Bingen

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Michael Marder

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?

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Machek

AbstractThis article offers a new interpretation of Aristotle’s ambiguous and much-discussed claim that pleasure perfects activity (NE x.4). This interpretation provides an alternative to the two main competing readings of this claim in the scholarship: the addition-view, which envisages the perfection conferred by pleasure as an extra perfection beyond the perfection of activity itself; and the identity-view, according to which pleasure just is the perfect activity itself. The proposed interpretation departs from both these views in rejecting their assumption that pleasure cannot perfect the activity itself, and argues that pleasure makes activity perfect by optimising the exercise of one’s capacities for that activity. Those who build or play music with pleasure do so better than those who do not delight in these activities. The basis of this interpretation is Aristotle’s little-read remarks from the following chapter, i. e. NE x.5, about how pleasure “increases” the activity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 294
Author(s):  
Laura Cervi ◽  
Fernando García ◽  
Carles Marín Lladó

During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on the construction of social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes the fantasmatic dimension of political discourse from Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter accounts between 1 March and 31 May. To do so, it applies a Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The study findings show that in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the main beatific and horrific subjects remain the core populist signifiers: the people and the elite. While Bolsonaro’s narrative was predominantly beatific, centered on the government, Trump’s was mostly horrific, centered on the elite. Trump signified the pandemic as a subject and an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed it as a circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined the people as working people, therefore their concerns about the pandemic were focused on the people’s ability to work.


Author(s):  
Mandi Astola

AbstractStudies in collective intelligence have shown that suboptimal cognitive traits of individuals can lead a group to succeed in a collective cognitive task, in recent literature this is called mandevillian intelligence. Analogically, as Mandeville has suggested, the moral vices of individuals can sometimes also lead to collective good. I suggest that this mandevillian morality can happen in many ways in collaborative activities. Mandevillian morality presents a challenge for normative virtue theories in ethics. The core of the problem is that mandevillian morality implies that individual vice is, in some cases, valuable. However, normative virtue theories generally see vice as disvaluable. A consequence of this is that virtue theories struggle to account for the good that can emerge in a collective. I argue that normative virtue theories can in fact accommodate for mandevillian emergent good. I put forward three distinctive features that allow a virtue theory to do so: a distinction between individual and group virtues, a distinction between motivational and teleological virtues, and an acknowledgement of the normativity of “vicious” roles in groups.


Author(s):  
Natasha Warner ◽  
Daniel Brenner ◽  
Jessamyn Schertz ◽  
Andrew Carnie ◽  
Muriel Fisher ◽  
...  

AbstractScottish Gaelic is sometimes described as having nasalized fricatives (/ṽ/ distinctively, and [f̃, x̃, h̃], etc. through assimilation). However, there are claims that it is not aerodynamically possible to open the velum for nasalization while maintaining frication noise. We present aerodynamic data from 14 native Scottish Gaelic speakers to determine how the posited nasalized fricatives in this language are realized. Most tokens demonstrate loss of nasalization, but nasalization does occur in some contexts without aerodynamic conflict, e.g., nasalization with the consonant realized as an approximant, nasalization of [h̃], nasalization on the preceding vowel, or sequential frication and nasalization. Furthermore, a very few tokens do contain simultaneous nasalization and frication with a trade-off in airflow. We also present perceptual evidence showing that Gaelic listeners can hear this distinction slightly better than chance. Thus, instrumental data from one of the few languages in the world described as having nasalized fricatives confirms that the claimed sounds are not made by producing strong nasalization concurrently with clear frication noise. Furthermore, although speakers most often neutralize the nasalization, when they maintain it, they do so through a variety of phonetic mechanisms, even within a single language.


1977 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 660-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. L. Griffin ◽  
D. Foulkes

29 subjects attempted, over a period of 10 nights, to influence their dreams using techniques described in Garfield's book, Creative Dreaming (1974). A target suggestion was selected from a list of six suggestions compiled by, or for, each subject. Subjects kept daily records during the experiment both of their efforts at dream influence and of the dreams they recalled. Four judges attempted to identify from the dream material the target suggestion on each subject's suggestion list. The results indicated that the judges were unable to do so at better than chance levels. Thus analysis indicated no reliable evidence that conscious presleep suggestions become incorporated into dream content.


2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wim De Neys

AbstractOaksford & Chater (O&C) rely on a data fitting approach to show that a Bayesian model captures the core reasoning data better than its logicist rivals. The problem is that O&C's modeling has focused exclusively on response output data. I argue that this exclusive focus is biasing their conclusions. Recent studies that focused on the processes that resulted in the response selection are more positive for the role of logic.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 495-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Vong

It is exceedingly plausible that the normative reason involving relations, ‘more reason to do than’ and ‘is rationally preferred to’, are transitive. Many philosophers and economists use the plausibility of covariation between these reason involving relations and the ‘better than’ relation to argue – or more often, to insist – that the ‘better than’ relation is also transitive. But Rachels, Temkin and Baumann provide powerful arguments for non-transitive betterness. Conversely, some defenders of non-transitive betterness, such as Friedman, use the covariation of betterness and reason to argue that the reason involving relations are also non-transitive. I will argue that both types of covariation argument are overly hasty. To do so, I will present two functions that input a non-transitive axiological ranking and output a transitive deontic ranking. I then argue that an ethical principle involving these functions has independent plausibility and avoids important objections associated with non-transitive betterness.


Utilitas ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldon Soifer ◽  
Béla Szabados

Consequentialism has trouble explaining why hypocrisy is a term of moral condem-nation, largely because hypocrites often try to deceive others about their own selfishness through the useof words or deeds which themselves have good consequences. We argue that consequentialist attempts to deal with the problem by separating the evaluation of agent and action, or by the directevaluation of dispositions, or by focusing on long-term consequences such as reliability and erosion of trust, all prove inadequate to the challenge. We go on to argue, however, that a version of consequentialism which values the fulfilment of desires, rather than mental states, is able to explain why hypocrisy is generally wrong, and indeed can do so better than its Kantian rivals.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byoung-Il Kim ◽  
Jin Hong

Cryptanalytic time memory tradeoff algorithms are tools for inverting one-way functions, and they are used in practice to recover passwords that restrict access to digital documents. This work provides an accurate complexity analysis of the perfect table fuzzy rainbow tradeoff algorithm. Based on the analysis results, we show that the lesser known fuzzy rainbow tradeoff performs better than the original rainbow tradeoff, which is widely believed to be the best tradeoff algorithm. The fuzzy rainbow tradeoff can attain higher online efficiency than the rainbow tradeoff and do so at a lower precomputation cost.


1993 ◽  
Vol 30 (04) ◽  
pp. 276-285
Author(s):  
Edward Denham

The past thirty years have seen great advances in many areas of the technologies used in naval vessels. Propulsion systems, machinery automation, and information management systems have all undergone revolutionary changes. The bridges of these ships have similarly seen the advent of many new sources of navigational and environmental data. The process of correlating and interpreting all of this information has until now remained very labor-intensive, subject to human error at many stages of the process. In response to this challenge, a suite of new equipment has been developed for distributing, displaying, correlating, and logging shipboard data. This equipment automates most of the low-level, routine tasks involved in navigating a vessel at sea, significantly reducing the stress and workload of bridge personnel. This gives the humans on the bridge more time for doing the job that they do so much better than machines: making decisions. This paper focuses on the key technologies that are used in these new products and the advances in bridge design and automation they make possible. The benefits of these new capabilities to system designers, to shipbuilders, and to ship operators are also explored.


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