"The act of becoming begins with context, body, the swell of a woman’s hip lit by cascading sunlight through a balmy spring window, the touch of heavenly winds across a hot face. We brush our toes into the sandy beaches of our coastlines and rich textures of pleasure seep into our feet. We were made beautifully, wonderfully. Body and mind together, as a single unit. Humankind does not hold license to call its collective body a horrible, ghastly entity rutting itself toward global destruction. As a race we are too hard on ourselves. We implant our newborns with social structures, infantile cooes and gender roles, until they grow enough to ask why." Melissa Ratajczak Ratel, The Beauty of Pride Particles of meaning draped whole-heartedly across the skies as day breaks, as night falls, in the in between before the storm and that first big breath. The macrocosm, the all is mirrored in the microscopic. Quantum Mechanics becomes planetary motion, as stardust turns to love. MacroMicroCosm is an art piece, an introspection, an immersion and a literary journal showcasing Vraeyda's ideals, artists, authors & talent. MacroMicroCosm is an inspection into the cycles and patterns that built our cosmos & rule our lives. Introspection turns into outward study, heaven turns to earth. MacroMicroCosm includes poetry, short stories, articles, art, photography and comics.

"From her amazingly visceral opening of Let There Be Light to her final haunting echo in the book’s epilogue, Burnell’s voice jumps off the page, much like a microphone-wielding circus MC standing centre ring. [Usurper Kings is] a work of breathtakingly beautiful discovery." Kevin Hogan Sapha Burnell’s stellar poetry collection inspects the feminine through time. From act I’s genesis and the search for meaning within the hunter gatherer mindset, to the existential singularity of a transhumanist future, Usurper Kings is a mind bending cerebral and emotionally rebellious series of poems. Infinitely feminine, mighty and sometimes rebellious, the essence of Usurper Kings is the search to remember feminine might and discover the power to take it back.

Today our fatigue feels chronic; our anxieties, amplified. Proliferating technologies command our attention. Many people complain of burnout, and economic instability and the threat of ecological catastrophe fill us with dread. We look to the past, imagining life to have once been simpler and slower, but extreme mental and physical stress is not a modern syndrome. Beginning in classical antiquity, this book demonstrates how exhaustion has always been with us and helps us evaluate more critically the narratives we tell ourselves about the phenomenon. Medical, cultural, literary, and biographical sources have cast exhaustion as a biochemical imbalance, a somatic ailment, a viral disease, and a spiritual failing. It has been linked to loss, the alignment of the planets, a perverse desire for death, and social and economic disruption. Pathologized, demonized, sexualized, and even weaponized, exhaustion unites the mind with the body and society in such a way that we attach larger questions of agency, willpower, and well-being to its symptoms. Mapping these political, ideological, and creative currents across centuries of human development, Exhaustion finds in our struggle to overcome weariness a more significant effort to master ourselves.

In this book, Conrad Rudolph studies and reconstructs Hugh of Saint Victor's forty-two-page written work, The Mystic Ark, which describes the medieval painting of the same name. In medieval written sources, works of art are not often referred to, let alone described in any detail. Almost completely ignored by art historians because of the immense difficulty of its text, Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark (c.1125–30) is among the most unusual sources we have for an understanding of medieval artistic culture. Depicting all time, all space, all matter, all human history and all spiritual striving, this highly polemical painting deals with a series of cultural issues crucial in the education of society's elite during one of the great periods of intellectual change in Western history.

As concerns about humankind’s relationship with the environment move inexorably up the agenda, this volume tells the story of the history of the concept of ecology itself and adds much to the historical and philosophical debate over this multifaceted discipline. The text provides readers with an overview of the theoretical, institutional and historical formation of ecological knowledge. The varied local conditions of early ecology are considered in detail, while epistemological problems that lie on the borders of ecology, such as disunity and complexity, are discussed. The book traces the various phases of the history of the concept of ecology itself, from its 19th century origins and antecedents, through the emergence of the environmental movement in the later 20th century, to the future, and how ecology might be located in the environmental science framework of the 21st century. The study of ‘ecological’ phenomena has never been confined solely to the work of researchers who consider themselves ecologists. It is rather a field of knowledge in which a plurality of practices, concepts and theories are developed. Thus, there exist numerous disciplinary subdivisions and research programmes within the field, the boundaries of which remain blurred. As a consequence, the deliberation to adequately identify the ecological field of knowledge, its epistemic and institutional setting, is still going on. This will be of central importance not only in locating ecology in the frame of 21st century environmental sciences but also for a better understanding of how nature and culture are intertwined in debates about pressing problems, such as climate change, the protection of species diversity, or the management of renewable resources.

In Elements, Principles and Particles, Antonio Clericuzio explores the relationships between chemistry and corpuscular philosophy in the age of the Scientific Revolution. Science historians have regarded chemistry and corpuscular philosophy as two distinct traditions. Clericuzio's view is that since the beginning of the 17th century atomism and chemistry were strictly connected. This is attested by Daniel Sennert and by many hitherto little-known French and English natural philosophers. They often combined a corpuscular theory of matter with Paracelsian chemical (and medical) doctrines. Boyle plays a central part in the present book: Clericuzio redefines Boyle's chemical views, by showing that Boyle did not subordinate chemistry to the principles of mechanical philosophy. When Boyle explained chemical phenomena, he had recourse to corpuscles endowed with chemical, not mechanical, properties. The combination of chemistry and corpuscular philosophy was adopted by a number of chemists active in the last decades of the 17th century, both in England and on the Continent. Using a large number of primary sources, the author challenges the standard view of the corpuscular theory of matter as identical with the mechanical philosophy. He points out that different versions of the corpuscular philosophy flourished in the 17th century. Most of them were not based on the mechanical theory, i.e. on the view that matter is inert and has only mechanical properties. Throughout the 17th century, active principles, as well as chemical properties, are attributed to corpuscles. Given its broad coverage, the book is a significant contribution to both history of science and history of philosophy.