Epilogue

The epilogue summarises the book’s narrative and outlines avenues for future research. Spiritual alchemy is chiefly important as a hybrid that defies a straightforward distinction between science and religion. In a way, its story is one of religious dissenters productively appropriating natural philosophy to articulate their faith. After laboratory alchemy was effectively eclipsed and the link to Jacob Boehme weakened, spiritual alchemy lost its internal cohesion and gave way to many divergent interpretations of alchemy that distanced it from the manipulation of material substances through chemical processes. Future studies will be able to shed more light on various alternative interpretations of alchemy that can now be perceived more clearly in contrast to the long tradition of spiritual alchemy described in this book.

Chemical Analysis of Water Hyacinth Ash by XRD and SEM

The specific term for the Water hyacinth plant is Eichhorniacrassipes. The water plant that flows freely, rising at still or slower water sources. Water Hyacinth develops massive biomass and doubles its population in two weeks by fast-growing. These entail a loss of biodiversity, water pollution, water loss, agriculture, infrastructure damage and negatively effect on public safety, and water species. The objective of the study is to evaluate the chemical composition of water hyacinth ash by XRD and SEM .XRD is an obligatory method for analysing the characteristics and composition of materials. It is a non-destructive method to analyse all types of material substances like powder, crystals, and fluids. Nowadays X-ray diffraction Techniques are utilized in assorted fields like research, development, and production of materials. The particle size, shapes, surface roughness, and fracture are defined using aEDAX. When a sample is placed on the beam and multiple signals determine the interactions with the samples. Acetone is used to stop the hydration reactions. Then the specimen is dried and made to conduct. Finally, a micrograph was recorded using SEM.

Chemical Analysis of Water Hyacinth Ash by XRD and SEM

The specific term for the Water hyacinth plant is Eichhorniacrassipes. The water plant that flows freely, rising at still or slower water sources. Water Hyacinth develops massive biomass and doubles its population in two weeks by fast-growing. These entail a loss of biodiversity, water pollution, water loss, agriculture, infrastructure damage and negatively effect on public safety, and water species. The objective of the study is to evaluate the chemical composition of water hyacinth ash by XRD and SEM .XRD is an obligatory method for analysing the characteristics and composition of materials. It is a nondestructive method to analyse all types of material substances like powder, crystals, and fluids. Nowadays X-ray diffraction Techniques are utilized in assorted fields like research, development, and production of materials. The particle size, shapes, surface roughness, and fracture are defined using aEDAX. When a sample is placed on the beam and multiple signals determine the interactions with the samples. Acetone is used to stop the hydration reactions. Then the specimen is dried and made to conduct. Finally, a micrograph was recorded using SEM.

Potens per accidens sine accidentibus: Ockham on Material Substances and Their Essential Powers

Medieval scholastics share a commitment to a substance-accident ontology and to an analysis of efficient causation in which agents act in virtue of their powers. Given these commitments, it seems ready-made which entities are the agents or powers: substances are agents and their accidents powers. William of Ockham, however, offers a rather different analysis concerning material substances and their essential powers, which this article explores. The article first examines Ockham’s account of propria and his reasons for claiming that a material substance is essentially powerful sine accidentibus. However, the article subsequently argues that, given Ockham’s reductionism about material substance, only substantial forms – never substances – are truly agents and powers. Thus, a material substance is essentially powerful but only by courtesy – per accidens, as Ockham calls it – because it has a non-identical part, its substantial form, which does all the causal work by itself, per se.

Aquinas on Passive Powers

Aquinas thinks that if we want to understand causal interactions between material substances, we cannot focus exclusively on agents and their active powers. In his view, there are also passive potencies which enable material substances to be acted upon. He claims that for every type of active potency, there is a corresponding passive potency. This article aims to clarify Aquinas’s views about the passive potencies of material substances. It recovers his thinking on three key questions: first, what is the basis or source of a material substance’s passive potentialities? Put otherwise, what constituents of material substances explain why they have capabilities for being acted upon? Second, how are a material substance’s passive potencies identified and distinguished from one another? Lastly, are passive potencies for undergoing action the same as a substance’s potencies for existing in determinate ways? For example, is a pot of water’s potentiality for being heated the same as its potentiality to be hot?

Aristotelian Powers, Mechanism, and Final Causes in the Late Middle Ages

Henrik Lagerlund explores the topic of final causality in the High and later Middle Ages. He argues that the seventeenth-century mechanists weren’t the only ones critiquing and rejecting final causality. There were earlier figures who developed a form of mechanical materialism that eschewed final causes, most notably William of Ockham and John Buridan. Lagerlund begins with the way that Ockham and Buridan in the fourteenth century understood the mereology of the body. Bodily substances were composed of essential parts and integral parts. Essential parts were its metaphysical constituents, its matter and substantial form. Integral parts were its various extended bits. This distinction generated a metaphysical divide between material objects with extended substantial forms and simple, immaterial substances like God, angels, and the human soul. And this divide raises a number of philosophical puzzles for the entities on either side of it. Of special concern to Lagerlund is the numeric identity and unity of material substances across time. Lagerlund shows how Buridan in particular struggled to make sense of the identity and unity of material substances through time. In the end, Buridan could only say that material substances are successively identical through time; they are not totally or partially identical.

Aquinas’ Reception in Contemporary Metaphysics

This chapter reviews Aquinas’ reception in contemporary metaphysics as it is practised today in the analytic tradition, focusing on issues that make this reception problematic. I identify the main trouble spots based on the historical development of the analytic tradition. The discussion will target those major conceptual hurdles inherent in the analytic tradition that Aquinas’ genuine reception faces regarding his metaphysical notions of being and essence and his conception of the hylomorphic composition of material substances. This strategy will allow me to introduce an ‘analytically acceptable’ sketch of the metaphysical foundations of Aquinas’ unique position on the ontological status of the human intellective soul, which places it on a razor-thin borderline between the material and purely spiritual realms of reality, running right across our very being. I conclude with a summary of the conceptual prerequisites of a genuine and full reception of Aquinas’ thought in contemporary metaphysical discourse.

Stochastic Perturbations on Low-Rank Hyperspectral Data for Image Classification

Hyperspectral imagery (HSI) contains hundreds of narrow contiguous bands of spectral signals. These signals, which form spectral signatures, provide a wealth of information that can be used to characterize material substances. In recent years machine learning has been used extensively to classify HSI data. While many excellent HSI classifiers have been proposed and deployed, the focus has been more on the design of the algorithms. This paper presents a novel data preprocessing method (LRSP) to improve classification accuracy by applying stochastic perturbations to the low-rank constituent of the dataset. The proposed architecture is composed of a low-rank and sparse decomposition, a degradation function and a constraint least squares filter. Experimental results confirm that popular state-of-the-art HSI classifiers can produce better classification results if supplied by LRSP-altered datasets rather than the original HSI datasets.