By William Bryant Logan
ISBN-10: 0393078663
ISBN-13: 9780393078664
Expert arborist and award-winning nature author William Bryant Logan deftly relates the pleasant heritage of the reciprocal dating among people and oak bushes because time immemorial—a profound hyperlink that has virtually been forgotten. From the ink of Bach’s cantatas, to the 1st boat to arrive the hot global, to the wagon, the barrel, and the sword, oak bushes were a continuing presence all through our historical past. in truth, civilization prospered the place oaks grew, and for hundreds of years those supremely adaptable, beneficiant bushes have supported humankind in approximately each aspect of existence. “With an unabashed enthusiasm for his subject” (Carol Haggas, Booklist) Logan combines technology, philosophy, spirituality, and historical past with a contagious interest approximately why the wildlife works how it does. immediately funny and reverent, “this perfect acknowledgment of a traditional marvel” (Publishing News) reintroduces the oak tree in order that we would see its bright presence all through our background and our sleek international.
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Extra resources for Oak: The Frame of Civilization
Sample text
But if a thing belongs to two different property classes, these two classes may not be so related. Secondly, a natural kind, unlike a property class, has no defining property. That is, there is no natural property which must, and can only, be possessed by things which are members of the kind. Certainly, there are natural properties which would distinguish, say, electrons from other kinds of things. Electrons must, for example, all have a certain mass, charge and spin. But there are very good reasons for saying that there is no property, such as that of being an electron, which all and only electrons can have.
If Mach had been right, then the dynamical properties of bodies, including their masses, would depend on the distribution of matter in the universe, and on their positions in relationship to it. In that case, mass would be an extrinsic property. 4. THE ESSENTIAL PROPERTIES OF NATURAL KINDS Among the intrinsic properties and structures of things are those which make them the kinds of things they are. These properties and structures are their essential properties, and, together, they constitute the Lockean real essences of these kinds.
Secondly, properties and processes are often hidden, or their effects swamped by other properties and processes. Indeed, some properties and processes rarely, if ever, occur in isolation, and often their effects cannot be measured directly. Consequently, to describe the effects of such properties or processes, it is often necessary to abstract from anything that can actually be observed to consider what would happen in the imagined absence of other factors that exist in the actual situation. As a result, descriptions of the essences of causal properties and processes are often abstract, and expressed either categorically, as statements about the behaviour of idealized objects in ideal circumstances, or subjunctively, as conditionals about how real objects would behave, if they, and the circumstances of their existence, were ideal.
Oak: The Frame of Civilization by William Bryant Logan
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