Granting that the `soul' was only an attractive and mysterious thought, from which philosophers rightly, but reluctantly, separated themselves - that which they have since learnt to put in its place is perhaps even more attractive and even more mysterious. The human body, in which the whole of the most distant and most recent past of all organic life once more becomes living and corporal, seems to flow through this past and right over it like a huge and inaudible torrent: (...) the body is a more wonderful thought than the old `soul'. (Nietzsche, 1973: 132-3) Man is but breath and a shadow. (Sophocles). (shrink)

The search for 'ecological insights' in venerable Asian traditions of thought prompts questions about how such traditions understood humans in relation to nature. Answers which focus on philosophical and religious ideas may overlook culturally important understandings of people and places articulated within scientific and medical thinking. The paper tentatively explores the prospects for gleaning a form of ethics of place from the study of traditional Hindu and Chinese medical sources. Although there are serious problems with the idea that any unadulterated (...) assimilation from other traditions can take place, these sources can be thought of as incorporating a place-centred ethic. By looking closely at Francis Zimmerman's study of Hindu medicine, it is argued that a poetics of place can be ascribed to Ayurvedic discourses on health and disease. It may be possible to associate a similar poetics with classical Chinese medical worldviews, these being reconcilable with-though not the same as-contemporary ecological understandings of humans in relation to the world. Although no pristine reconstruction of Asian traditions of medical thought can be made, the conclusion of the present paper is that it would be wrong to dismiss these traditions as 'antienvironmental', based purely on the study of philosophical and religious texts. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article examines advertisements for potential solutions to the problem of longitude during the year following the announcement of the maximum £20,000 reward in the summer of 1714. While there have been many studies of the race to determine longitude, advertisements have not received close scrutiny. Little attention has been paid to the commoditization of longitude in the marketplace of public science sold within London's public sphere. Although books and lecture series dominated public science in eighteenth-century England, longitude ads are (...) a unique example of this phenomenon. Unlike lecturers or publishers of natural philosophical tracts who sought audiences for demonstrations or readers for books which contained accounts of nature that were not open to debate, longitude seekers were doing something different. Those who attempted to solve the problem of longitude and advertised their plans to the public sought out witnesses to validate and confirm the effectiveness of their experiments or instruments. In other words, the public sphere became the crucible of judgment for schemes of longitude. (shrink)