Trees in the landscape: orchard trees in a 17th-century French dictionary

The 17th century was a time of change in both agriculture and architecture as both nobility and newly rich bourgeois sought to embellish country residences with gardens and orchards. Not only were new plants arriving from overseas, but gardening was being revolutionised by the likes of Le Nôtre, de la Quintinie and the lesser known Fatio. This was reflected in the Dictionnaire universel de Antoine Furetière, the first genuinely encyclopaedic dictionary. This paper starts by introducing the LandLex initiative, pan-European synchronic and diachronic collaborative analyses of simple words concerning the landscape in historical dictionaries. We then look at a selected number of orchard trees and their fruit in two editions of the Dictionnaire universel: the first edition of 1690 and that revised by Basnage de Beauval in 1701. To an extent, Furetière applied a model for classifying trees and fruit that can be extracted by analysis. Some entries went into excessive detail as those of pear, a highly fashionable fruit at the time. One major difference between the two is Basnage’s move from a single author approach to the use of field experts in certain areas, amongst which botany. Much was simply carried over, but when Dr Régis, Basnage’s expert in medicine and natural history, deemed an entry of scientific interest it was given a rewrite with new background texts being cited, thereby widening our vision of developing 17th-century science.

The twentieth century science paradoxes

The isolation of hypothetical theories from the realities of living matter has caused mysticism to penetrate scientific theories. With mystical thinking, the idea of using an analytical method to solve cognitive problems does not occur. Dialectical logic, in contrast to mysticism, states the opposite: any problematic tasks of cognizing the vital processes and phenomena of the universe are solvable exclusively in an analytic way, with the only method. The author created a universal and formal theory of solving intellectual (i.e., having no previously known algorithms for solving) problems associated with the knowledge of the vital functions of natural and man-made processes in any phenomena of the universe - the Kondratenko method of axiomatic modeling, the effectiveness of which is achieved by correctly setting the problem and solving it purely formal method. The correctness of the statement of the problem means, first of all, the recognition of the failure of all hypothetical (not confirmed by the results of full-scale experimentation with the subject of knowledge) theories. This requirement, in particular, to the mathematical tools used to solve problems of cognition, it revealed paradoxes in the foundations of mathematics, which are discussed in the article. At present, in the natural and applied sciences in most publications, i.e. more than 90% associated with the construction of formal theories in these sciences, the proof of theorems is carried out: firstly, in a meaningful way, which contradicts the urgent requirement of philosophers of science to use exclusively formal evidence, which is a criterion for assessing the correctness and reliability of evidence; secondly, in substantive evidence in 95% of cases, an exclusively standard list of tautologies is used, which by definition is incorrect for the purpose of proving theorems on phenomena and processes of the universe based on exclusively true axioms obtained as a result of full-scale experimentation with these phenomena and processes. The article deals with the paradox in the classical approach to proving theorems, which consists in the inappropriateness of generally accepted stereotypical tautologies of classical mathematics for proving theorems.

Mac Giolla Phádraig Clerics 1394-1534 AD: Part I

Mac Giolla Phádraig Clerics 1394-1534 AD is a three-part series, which provides an account of all known individual Mac Giolla Phádraig clerics in the late medieval era and details their temporalities, occupations, familial associations, and broader networks. The ultimate goal of the series is the full contextualisation of all available historical records relating to Mac Giolla Phádraig clerics alongside the genealogical record that can be extracted by twenty-first century science – that being the science of Y-DNA. The Papal Registers, in particular, record numerous occurrences of Mac Giolla Phádraig clerics, predominantly in the dioceses of Cill Dalua (Killaloe) and Osraí (Ossory), from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. Yet, no small intrigue surrounds their emergence. Part I of Mac Giolla Phádraig Clerics 1394-1534 AD examines the context surrounding the earliest appointments of Mac Giolla Phádraig clerics, which is in neither Cill Dalua nor Osraí but the diocese of Luimneach (Limerick). Once that context is understood, a pattern of associations emerges. A ‘coincidental’ twenty-first century surname match from the Fitzpatrick Y-DNA project leads to a review of the relationship between the FitzMaurice of Ciarraí (Kerry) clerics and Jordan Purcell, Bishop of Cork and Cloyne (1429-1472). The ‘coincidence’ then leads to an examination of a close Y-DNA match between men of the surnames Purcell and Hennessey. That match, coupled with the understanding that Nicholas Ó hAonghusa (O’Hennessey), elected Bishop of Lismore and Waterford (1480-1483) but with opposition, is considered a member of Purcell’s household, transforms the ‘coincidence’ into a curiosity. Part I morphs into a conversation, likely uncomfortable for some, relating to clerical concubinage, illegitimacy, and the ‘lubricity’ of the prioress and her nuns at the Augustinian nunnery of St Catherine's O’Conyll. The nunnery was located at Mainistir na gCailleach Dubh (Monasternagalliaghduff), which lay just a stone’s throw from where Bishop Jordan Purcell and Matthew Mac Giolla Phádraig, the first Mac Giolla Phádraig cleric recorded in the Papal Registers, emerged. Part I makes no judgments and draws no firm conclusions but prepares the reader for Part II by ending with some questions. Do the Mac Giolla Phádraig clerics of Osraí, who rose to prominence in the late-fifteenth century, have their origins in Deasmhumhain (Desmond)? Could the paternal lineages of Mac Giolla Phádraig clerics be, at least from the mid-fourteenth century, with the house of the Geraldine FitzMaurice clerics of Ciarraí? And, could some of the modern-day descendants of the Mac Giolla Phádraig clerics be those Costigans, FitzGeralds, and Fitzpatricks who are found under haplotype R-A1488?

Priest, Philosopher, and Theologian Pavel Florensky in the Perception of Generations (in the Russian Emigration and Russia)

The article discusses some works on priest Pavel Florensky’s philosophical and theological legacy of the 1930s–2020s. The author of the article has examined changes in the perception of Florensky and his ideas among Russian émigré philosophers as well as in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The difference in such assessments is clearly visible in two reviews of 1930 of the priest’s book called The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. The review written by G.V. Florovsky has a critical bias, while that of V.N. Ilyin is very positive. We find a more comprehensive expression of Ilyin’s attitude to Florensky in the article Father Pavel Florensky. The Silenced Great Miracle of Twentieth Century Science (1969). The works published in the Russian emigration are characterized by subjectivity due to lack of sources, as most of Florensky’s works remained unpublished. In Soviet Russia, one of the most famous works about Florensky was S.S. Khoruzhy’s book named Florensky’s World View (1999). In this book, Father Pavel’s worldview was reconstructed from the perspective of “existential” experience. S.M. Polovinkin gave another, “personalistic” interpretation in his book Christian Personalism of Priest Pavel Florensky (2015). Hegumen Andronik (Trubachev) was the first to highlight the significance of anthropodicy and its connection with theodicy in his work Theodicy and Anthropodicy in Priest Pavel Florensky’s Works (1998). He presented Florensky’s worldview as a system of concrete metaphysics, combining theodicy and anthropodicy. Moreover, he refuted the popular misconception of Florensky’s philosophy as “the allunity metaphysics.” Further, Hegumen Andronik wrote a fundamental work on Florensky’s life and works that he named The Way to God (2012–2020). The present article states that Hegumen Andronik’s work trailed the path to objective research, overcoming the inertia of thought that arose from bias and lack of sources.

Prosthetic Vision and Postmortem Cinema

The nineteenth-century science of “optography” was based on the idea that an image of the last thing seen at the moment of death would be imprinted on the retina. This idea was inspired by the invention of photography, which reinforced the mechanistic notion of the eye as a camera, and it was frequently criticized in nineteenth-century literary texts, in which eyes more often record images generated from within the mind. Belief in optography began to wane at roughly the same time that cinema became a popular form of entertainment, but it continued to appear in several films in which severed eyes function as cameras or optical implants are used to record visual impressions that can be viewed after the death of the subject. This article examines how these optographic narratives continued to reinforce the mechanistic notion of visual perception on which film technology was thought to depend.