Stuff

THE CHEMISTRY OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF SOUTHAMERICA. The contribution of non-European cultures to science and technology, primarily to chemistry, has gained very little attentions until now. Especially the high technological intelligence and inventiveness of South American native populations shall be put into a different light by our contribution. The purpose of this essay is to show that mainly in the area of chemical practices the indigenous competence was considerable and has led to inventions profitable nowadays to millions of people in the western world and especially to the pharmacy corporations. We would like to illustrate this assumption by giving some examples of chemical practices of transformation of substances, mainly those unknown in the Old World. The indigenous capacity to gain and to transform substances shall be shown here by the manufacture of poisons, such as curare or the extraction of toxic substances of plants, like during the fabrication of manioc flower. We shall mention as well other processes of multi-stage transformations and the discovery and the use of highly effective natural substances by Amazonian native populations, such as, for example, rubber, ichthyotoxic substances or psychoactive drugs.

Focusing particularly on *Provincializing Europe* (PE), this essay is cast as a close and critical engagement with the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty over almost three decades. To begin with, I trace how Chakrabarty’s provocations have pointed toward post-coloniality and modernity as necessarily contradictory, contended, and contingent procedures and perspectives. Second, the essay tracks pathways that PE haltingly intimates and partially illuminate but mostly routes that the work chiefly shies of treading, in order to open up instead the different registers of historicism, the hermeneutical, and the analytical, including their mutual interplay and formidable entanglements, as formative of modern knowledges. Finally, these steps help foreground my own explorations of modernity. Braiding together analytical impulses and hermeneutic sensibilities, theory and narrative, these efforts have distinguished between historically located subjects of modernity as bearers of heterogeneous reasons/understandings, on the one hand, and routine representations of the modern subject as insinuating a singular rationality, on the other, which together carry wide implications.

Abstract singular nouns (e.g., ‘whiteness’, ‘humanhood’), on the standard account, refer to attributes.  But many of them (e.g., ‘whiteness’) are mass nouns.  Like concrete mass nouns (e.g., ‘water’), they can combine with determiners relating to amounts of stuff (e.g., ‘a little’, ‘much’, ‘less’).  Levinson (1978; 1980) argues that this means that a large group of attributes are stuffs of some kind: abstract stuffs.  This view, the stuff view, is widely considered indefensible.  But it would be hard to resist the view without rejecting the usual account of determiners that combine with mass nouns, the quantity account, according to which such determiners relate to amounts of stuff.  This paper argues against both the stuff view and quantity account, and presents an account of abstract mass nouns based on an adequate account of determiners that combine with them.

The proper sensible criterion of sensory individuation holds that senses are individuated by the special kind of sensibles on which they exclusively bear about (colors for sight, sounds for hearing, etc.). H. P. Grice objected to the proper sensibles criterion that it  cannot account for the phenomenal difference between feeling and seeing shapes or other common sensibles. That paper advances a novel answer to Grice's objection.  Admittedly, the upholder of the proper sensible criterion must bind the proper sensibles –i.e. colors– to the common sensibles –i.e. shapes– so as to account for the visual phenomenal character of shapes. But, as Grice rightly objected, neither association, nor ontological dependence will do –I spend some time isolating why dependence is a bad answer here, basically because the dependence of shape on colors is generic, and that genericity is arguably not part of the phenomenal content of perception.

Grice is wrong, however, to think that once association and dependence have been rebutted, there is no other way to attach color to extension. The right way to connect proper and common sensibles is rather trivial, although it seems to have been widely neglected: proper sensibles FILL common ones. To see a shape, by contrast to feeling it, is to perceived as filled by some color. To feel a shape, is to perceive it as, say, filled by pressure. Filling in is the phenomenal connection between proper and common sensibles.

One important corollary of that proposal is that proper sensibles –color, pressure, noise, taste...– have to belong to the category of stuffs, in the sense of uncountable entities. Against the widespread view that colors are properties, which have countable instances, the last part of the paper argues that colors are phenomenal stuffs, which fill some visual area. One commits a category mistake in asking: "How many  tropes/instances of this determinate redness is there on that ladybird". One should rather ask "How much of this determinate redness is there on that ladybird".

This paper argues for including stuff in one’s ontology. The distinction between things and stuff is first clarified, and then three different ontologies of the physical universe are spelled out: a pure thing ontology, a pure stuff ontology, and a mixed ontology of both things and stuff. (The paper defends the latter.) Eleven different reasons for including stuff (in addition to things) in one’s ontology are given (seven of which the author endorses and four of which would be sensible reasons for philosophers with certain metaphysical positions that the author does not happen to hold). Then five objections to positing stuff are considered and rejected.

This article presents the PATTERN system analysis technique used for scientific and technical analysis and forecasting the development and use of complex systems resources. The methodology is considered from the point of view of its application in the economic systems of strategic planning of the company in personnel matters of recruitment. The basic principles that are the key points in the formation of an effective staffing system in terms of the strategic goals of the company are stated. The algorithm of formation of the personnel policy of the company is considered, from the position of the Using the Pattern Method for the Comprehensive Organization of Recruitment and Selection of Personnel http://www.iaeme.com/IJARET/index.asp 291 editor@iaeme.com economic concept of human capital, as the quintessence of all the combined economic and labour opportunities of the company personnel. The proposed methodology of system analysis is adapted to be applied to provide opportunities for the application of sound management decisions in matters of personnel policy of the company, as well as strengthening human capital.

The proper sensible criterion of sensory individuation holds that senses are individuated by the special kind of sensibles on which they exclusively bear about (colors for sight, sounds for hearing, etc.). H. P. Grice objected to the proper sensibles criterion that it cannot account for the phenomenal difference between feeling and seeing shapes or other common sensibles. That paper advances a novel answer to Grice's objection. Admittedly, the upholder of the proper sensible criterion must bind the proper sensibles –i.e. colors– to the common sensibles –i.e. shapes– so as to account for the visual phenomenal character of shapes. But, as Grice rightly objected, neither association, nor ontological dependence will do –I spend some time isolating why dependence is a bad answer here, basically because the dependence of shape on colors is generic, and that genericity is arguably not part of the phenomenal content of perception. Grice is wrong, however, to think that once association and dependence have been rebutted, there is no other way to attach color to extension. The right way to connect proper and common sensibles is rather trivial, although it seems to have been widely neglected: proper sensibles FILL common ones. To see a shape, by contrast to feeling it, is to perceived as filled by some color. To feel a shape, is to perceive it as, say, filled by pressure. Filling in is the phenomenal connection between proper and common sensibles. One important corollary of that proposal is that proper sensibles –color, pressure, noise, taste...– have to belong to the category of stuffs, in the sense of uncountable entities. Against the widespread view that colors are properties, which have countable instances, the last part of the paper argues that colors are phenomenal stuffs, which fill some visual area. One commits a category mistake in asking: "How many tropes/instances of this determinate redness is there on that ladybird". One should rather ask "How much of this determinate redness is there on that ladybird"

A Tn5-1063-derived mutant of Nostoc punctiforme strain ATCC 29133 was unable to fix N2 in air although it reduced acetylene in the absence of O2. Mutant strain UCD 307 formed cells morphologically similar to heterocysts, but it failed to synthesize the characteristic heterocyst glycolipids. Sequence analysis around the site of insertion revealed an ORF of 3,159 base pairs, termed hglE. hglE putatively encodes a 115.4-kDa protein containing two domains with conserved amino acid sequences identified with acyl transferase and the chain length factor variation of β-ketoacyl synthase active sites. These active sites are characteristic of polyketide and fatty acid synthases. The N. punctiforme strain 29133 hglE gene is transcribed only under nitrogen-limiting growth conditions. The hglE gene, or similar sequences, was found in all other heterocyst-forming cyanobacteria surveyed and was absent in unicellular Synechococcus sp. strain PCC 7942. Based on these results, we propose that the synthesis of heterocyst glycolipids follows a pathway characteristic of polyketide synthesis and involves similar large, multienzyme complexes.

Quine's attempt to account for (i.e. to explain away) the unbounded semantics and metaphysics of (some) mass nouns in terms of a 'split' between (reconstructed)  talk of a kind and talk of what is of that kind is an intriguing example of reasoning twisted by a prior commitment to an ontology of count nouns.

This paper builds on Isabelle Stengers' suggestion that we need to reclaim magic, sorcery and witchcraft as a means of refuting the stable rational subject. Working with current philosophical and critical ideas around 'new materialisms', it emerges from a longstanding set of research preoccupations related to the affective, disruptive and provocative properties of things. The episodic text ruminates on these ideas through a series of 'site-written' narratives on the traces of sorcery and radical political histories in the villes and forests of Limousin, France, intercepted by passages of analysis of the