7 research outputs found
Studies on nutritional and medicinal properties of chamomile flower, pumpkin fruit and maca root
No full textMedicines derived from medicinal plants are effective and safe, providing significant nutritional and therapeutic benefits. The purpose of this study was to determine the nutritional and medicinal values of chamomile flower, pumpkin fruit, and mace root. Standard methods were used to analyze the proximate and mineral compositions. By using the DPPH radical scavenging assay, antioxidant activity was evaluated. The exotic plants showed significant variations in moisture contents: chamomile (14.89%), pumpkin (89.22%), and maca (7.70%). Ash content: chamomile (8.26%), pumpkin (0.79%), and maca (4.39%). Crude fiber content: chamomile (13.89%), pumpkin (0.87%), and maca (4.24%) and Lipid content: chamomile; (10.89%), pumpkin (1.55%), maca (17.39%). Protein content:;: chamomile (19.06%) pumpkin (3.06%) and maca (21.39%). Carbohydrate content: chamomile (33.16%), pumpkin (4.46%) and maca (44.84%), The crude methanol extracts exhibited high antioxidant activity, with IC50 values of 66.75 µg/ml (pumpkin), 32.99µg/ml (chamomile), and 84.55µg/ml (maca). Pumpkin, maca and chamomile powders were rich in essential elements like Na, K, Fe, Ca, Mn and Zn. The study revealed the nutritional and medicinal potential of chamomile, pumpkin and maca powders, making them suitable for practical applications. The detected phyto-constituents may be responsible for the plants\u27 ethno-medicinal properties. These findings provide a scientific basis for the use of these plants in food and pharmaceutical industries
Disciplining the Spectator: Subjectivity, the Body and Contemporary Spectatorship
No full textIn this thesis the author argues that although questions of the spectator’s corporeal engagement with film are much neglected by film theory, the body is nevertheless a central term within contemporary cinema, in its mode of address, as a locus of anxiety in media effects debate, and as site of disciplinary practices. And while the thesis begins by demonstrating both the socially and historically constructed nature of spectatorship, and the specific practices that work to create contemporary cinema’s corporeal address, the latter half of the dissertation devotes itself to revealing the regulatory implications of this physical address. That is, the author shows that cinema’s perceived capacity of affect the body of the spectator is a profound source of cultural anxiety. But more importantly, through an analysis of the films Funny Games, Irréversible, Wolf Creek, and the genre of ‘torture porn’ more generally, what is revealed in these final chapters is that the regulation of cinema in the contemporary era is less a question of the institutionalised censorship of texts, and more a question of regulating the ‘self’. In this respect, the author demonstrates the specific disciplinary practices that attempt to present the problem of violent, and sexually violent, imagery not as a textual issue per se, but a question of the formation of appropriate spectatorial relations. Moreover, this study begins the process of teasing out the ways in which the contemporary spectator is induced to see the problem of media violence as one that can be resolved through what
Foucault would term, techniques of the self
Creative revolution : Bergson's social thought
No full textI have three main aims in writing this thesis on the social thought of Henri
Bergson: to establish what society is in his view, to work out the implications of
this for individuality, and to demonstrate the contemporary value of his
philosophy as a whole, thus construed. It will be the task of the first two chapters
to establish that society is a biological and cultural reality for Bergson. This will
involve the demonstration that Bergson’s understanding of living systems can be
applied to groups as well as to single organisms, and that while the biological
evolution of society underlies both individual actions and cultural evolution they
nevertheless remain irreducible to it. In chapter three, I will consider the
implications of his account of society for our understanding of the individual.
These implications will be quite serious, as Bergson attributes an irreducible
agency to society that immediately demands a re-assessment of the agency of the
individual in terms of a participation in wider natural and cultural processes, and
specifically a re-assessment of the central Bergsonian notion of individual
freedom in the context of this natural and cultural evolution. In the conclusion, I
will make a case that the value of Bergson’s philosophy today is that it can help
us to move beyond the mechanistic paradigm that has dominated western thought
since the scientific revolution by providing a powerful image of our relation to
each other and to nature that is based on participation rather than control.
In addition, there are two themes running through the thesis. One concerns
Bergson’s critique of dogmatism both in philosophy and in the sciences, and his
insistence that new ways of thinking be developed in response to new experience
that cannot be integrated into existing interpretive models. In order to remain
true to the spirit of his thought it has in many places been necessary to re-think
his conclusions in relation to a new scientific context, rather than merely repeat
what he says. The other concerns Bergson’s strong commitment to the role that
philosophy can play in overcoming the natural tendency to control our
environment, a tendency that he saw gaining a dangerous hold over the human
spirit in the age of industrial capitalism. The essence of philosophy in this
context is revealed to be a shift in attitude from control to participation
Deleuze's becoming-subject : difference and the human individual
No full textThis study argues that a theory of the distinctively human Individual lies latent within Deleuze's
readings of Hume and Bergson and his two major metaphysical treatises. This evolving theory
derives from efforts to re-think the concept of 'the subject' In terms of 'difference', 'becoming',
'repetition' and 'event'. Using critical exegesis, the study shows that Deleuze's model is precise
and workable, capable of supplanting discredited accounts of the subject and nullifying charges
that Deleuze is an 'anti-humanist'.
Deleuze's subject is neither pre-existent nor stable, but always in the process of becoming-other,
Individuated by Inherent differences. Chapter 1 argues that Deleuze's account (and
several theoretical resources) can be traced to an early engagement with empiricism, where he
uses Humean atomism to define a field of difference 'within which' associationist psychological
tendencies define the subject as a 'fiction'. As Chapter 2 shows, weaknesses in this model lead
Deleuze to Bergson. Having adopted Bergsonlan Intuition as his method, Deleuze seeks after
the preconditions of the flow and temporality of consciousness. He determines that the
subjects constitutive moment is the virtual point of intersection between the physicality of
material objects and the 'inner life' of consciousness.
Chapter 3 turns to questions of ontology and ethics, arguing that Deleuze's theory of internal
difference accounts for the role of contingent circumstances In subject-formation whilst his
theory of the event establishes each lived moment as unique. Deleuze Interprets Nietzsche's
eternal return as an ontological device entailing the recurrence of difference in the lived time of
the subject's 'becoming', and as the means for coherence between the moments of a life. This
theory leads Deleuze to an 'ethics of the event' with the goal of transforming human thinking
from a concentration on unity and identity towards a more creative and fulfilling life of
becoming
A reading of selected writings of James Joyce in relation to the works of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari)
No full textChapter One consists in a more complete survey of the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the works of James Joyce than has previously been available,
together with an overview of Deleuzian philosophy. The focus in the first chapter is on Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's reading of philosophers and writers alike as
4 symptornatologists' of their times and the ethico-political beliefs which they implicitly share with Joyce. I relate this to Hardt and Negri's political speculations.
The conceptual 'tools' which make up 'schizoanalysis' are set out. The second chapter uses these tools in a 'symptomatological' diagnosis by first setting out and
then going beyond Joyce's depiction of the 'paralysis' of the populace in Dubliners and A Portrait to his fuller understanding of our problematic situation in modernity
depicted and diagnosed in the masochism of Bloom in Ulysses. In Chapter Three, I look at the epiphany, Deleuze's concept of Joyce's 'epiphanic machine', 'duration' as understood by Bergson and Deleuze, and the Deleuzian concept of 'affect' as potentially liberatory insights, after the preceding focus on negative
4 symptornatological' diagnoses. Together with a critique of the prevailing views of Joyce's epiphany I analyse three stories in Dubliners as illustrative of Deleuze's
understanding of the concept of the epiphany. In the fourth and fifth chapters I focus on Issy in the Wake read in terms of the 'bird-girl' of A Portrait and couple this with
the Deleuzian concept of the 'girl' as a crucial, but misunderstood, node in what can be seen as the 'rhizomatic assemblage' or 'network' constituting the 'epiphanic
machine' of the Wake. In Chapter Four, after first setting out the range of readings of Issy available in current Joycean criticism, I look at 'The Mime of Mick Nick and the
Maggies' (FW219.18-252.21) in terms of a further Joycean challenge to modernity's 'oedipalising' tendencies through Izod/ Issy. Here, I place a final emphasis on the
significance of incest and the incest taboo in 'the Mime' as the culmination of Joyce's 'symptomatological' diagnosis of modernity, and in counterbalancing this, his use of
the 'affect' of colour to offer us a productive 'line of flight'. In Chapter Five I recapitulate on Deleuze's highlighting of the letter in his positive comments on the
Wake and then, by using some established discussions in Joycean criticism as an introduction, engage in a reading of Issy's letter (FW 279F 1) as the Wakean 'line of
flight' by reading 'her' as liberatory 'desiring machine' with all of its ethico-political potentialities
Edges of the mind : psychic margins and the modernist aesthetic in Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion Fortune and Jane Harrison.
No full textPhDThe question 'Where does she begin and I end, asked in Virginia Woolf's The Years, voices a modernist
concern with the limits of self-identity and related questions of egoism and altruism. In this thesis I argue
that this concern is informed by a pre-history of thinking about selfhood, psychic boundaries and the
spiritual mainly ignored by readings of modernism which map the psyche via psychoanalysis, or Freud's
'discovery of the unconscious'. Our thinking about the self has become colonised by the literary doctrines of
better known canonical figures of the modernist period, generating a way of thinking about the limits of the
psyche which is both literally and metaphorically circumscribed. A reading of more eccentric discourses
explicitly engaged in negotiating the boundaries of individuality can provide a history of the psychic
underpinnings to the modernist conception of the self. The representation of marginal states of
consciousness, or epiphanic moments, is crucial to the literature of modernism: interpretation of these altered
states, or edges, can be refigured through readings of Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion
Fortune and Jane Harrison: five women writing between 1880-1930 for whom pre-Freudian forms of
dissolution and challenge to self-unity are palpably present in the form of telepathy, subliminal selves,
oceanic consciousness and internal multiplicity. In addition to writing non-fictional texts which variously
explore the psychological, philosophical, ethical, spiritual and occult implications of the modernist position,
each of these women, excepting the classical scholar Jane Harrison, also wrote fiction. The aesthetic
questions of modernism dovetail into the theoretical arguments of the writers in this thesis, inviting a
different reading of its psychological sub-text and to suggest that where 'stream-of-consciousness' is
stylistically indispensable, the 'oceanic', as counterpart, thematically haunts the modernist aestheti
A sociologia antropocêntrica de Alberto Guerreiro Ramos
No full textTese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia Política.No elenco das diferentes modalidades de estudos que sobre o pensamento sociológico de Alberto Guerreiro Ramos já foram realizadas, esta tese se coloca como uma possibilidade de interpretação que propicie aclarar, não as pontualidades temáticas ou as respostas aos problemas contingentes a que este sociólogo se propôs pensar, mas a coerência de suas crenças no tempo. Segundo pensamos, esta interpretação pautada na coerência das crenças guerreirianas pode trazer elucidações fundamentais acerca do alcance, do sentido e da finalidade da construção teórica à qual ele se dedicou, dos principais conceitos, modelos e proposituras por ele construídas, bem como permite justificar a mobilização e apropriação de conceitos e correntes teóricas por ele procedidas. Neste sentido, a tese que aqui se apresenta defende que há, no conjunto da obra de Guerreiro Ramos, uma forte crença da premência de um novo humanismo e, em termos correlatos, de um novo tipo humano, a partir dos quais seria possível teorizar sobre a vida humana individual e associada. Uma expressão marcante dessa crença do autor está na preocupação e no pressuposto por ele assumidos de que a sociedade deveria ser vertida ao homem, e não o inverso. Esta crença tem seu correspondente na afirmativa de Protágoras, e com a qual Aristóteles estava de pleno acordo: anthrôpos metro panthô chrématon (o homem é a medida de todas as coisas humanas). Munido deste humanismo radical, nosso sociólogo passou em revista os pressupostos sobre o homem que legitimavam a ciência social de sua época, denunciou os principais obstáculos sociais impeditivos de um processo de humanização e articulou a sua proposta de uma nova ciência do social. É neste sentido que afirmamos ser antropocêntrica a sociologia de Guerreiro Ramos. Esta pesquisa, assim, atenta para uma questão que até agora é inédita, tendo-se em conta todos os trabalhos que trataram da obra ou dos estudos de Guerreiro Ramos. Several studies about Ramos#s sociological thought have been written in Brazil. The purpose of this dissertation is to be an interpretation to clarify some elements that support the Ramos#s coherence of beliefs in time. This coherence exists in all Ramos#s work, since his juvenile papers until his last book. We believe that our interpretation can be help in the understanding of the reach, of the meaning, and of the final aim of his theoretical work or of his concepts, models, and sociological proposals. Also we believe that our interpretation can help in the understanding of his displacement of concepts and filiations with currents of thought. In this dissertation we demonstrated that there is in the Ramos#s works a strong belief in the urgency of a new humanism, and a new human type, starting from which would be possible to theorize about the individual and associated human life, in others words, a humanism which the man was the measure of everything. An example of this is his concern and presupposition that the society should be structured for the man and not the opposite. With this radical humanist point of view, Ramos revised the man presupposition of the social science of his time, denounced the main social obstacles to the humanization process, and proposed a new science of social. In this way, we affirm that the Ramos#s sociological thought is anthrophocentric
