Platonic Reflections in Apuleius

Apuleius is often considered to be a Latin sophist, a master of narratological and hermeneutic games, with no particular philosophical agenda. But complexity and playfulness are not necessarily synonymous with intellectual or moral emptiness. Indeed, Apuleius’ self-proclaimed Platonism links him to a figure whose very choice of medium, the dialogue, always plays philosophical games with the reader. This dissertation shows that Apuleius engages with Plato on a deeper level than has previously been thought, framing both his own texts and those of Plato in terms of a high-stakes choice to the reader in the spirit of the ‘choice of Heracles’. I focus on Apuleius’ use of the mirror trope – a trope he inherits from Plato but refracts through the Roman literary tradition. I argue that when Lucius looks into mirrors in the Metamorphoses, such as the mirroring water of Byrrhena’s atrium or the catoptric hair of the maid-servant Photis, Apuleius invites the reader into a complex game of identification and criticism. Lucius’ specular contemplation, though he attempts to fashion it after idealized Platonic mirroring encounters, begins to appear more like the delusional mirror-gazing of Ovid’s Narcissus or Seneca’s Hostius Quadra upon further analysis. Readers, who have been tricked into participating in a shared voyeurism with Lucius, are compelled to see themselves at the same time as they see Lucius in the mirror. At that moment, the reader is put into a kind of Platonic bind, whereby he or she is forced to choose whether or not to continue following Lucius into voyeuristic delusion

Keller-Segel-Type Models and Kinetic Equations for Interacting Particles: Long-Time Asymptotic Analysis

This thesis consists of three parts: The first and second parts focus on long-time asymptotics of macroscopic and kinetic models respectively, while in the third part we connect these regimes using different scaling approaches. (1) Keller–Segel-type aggregation-diffusion equations: We study a Keller–Segel-type model with non-linear power-law diffusion and non-local particle interaction: Does the system admit equilibria? If yes, are they unique? Which solutions converge to them? Can we determine an explicit rate of convergence? To answer these questions, we make use of the special gradient flow structure of the equation and its associated free energy functional for which the overall convexity properties are not known. Special cases of this family of models have been investigated in previous works, and this part of the thesis represents a contribution towards a complete characterisation of the asymptotic behaviour of solutions. (2) Hypocoercivity techniques for a fibre lay-down model: We show existence and uniqueness of a stationary state for a kinetic Fokker-Planck equation modelling the fibre lay-down process in non-woven textile production. Further, we prove convergence to equilibrium with an explicit rate. This part of the thesis is an extension of previous work which considered the case of a stationary conveyor belt. Adding the movement of the belt, the global equilibrium state is not known explicitly and a more general hypocoercivity estimate is needed. Although we focus here on a particular application, this approach can be used for any equation with a similar structure as long as it can be understood as a certain perturbation of a system for which the global Gibbs state is known. (3) Scaling approaches for collective animal behaviour models: We study the multi-scale aspects of self-organised biological aggregations using various scaling techniques. Not many previous studies investigate how the dynamics of the initial models are preserved via these scalings. Firstly, we consider two scaling approaches (parabolic and grazing collision limits) that can be used to reduce a class of non-local kinetic 1D and 2D models to simpler models existing in the literature. Secondly, we investigate how some of the kinetic spatio-temporal patterns are preserved via these scalings using asymptotic preserving numerical methods

Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in an eighteenth-century Swiss canton: the case of Dr Laurent Garcin

Symposium: S048 - Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in the long eighteenth centuryThis paper takes as a case study the experience of the eighteenth-century Swiss physician, Laurent Garcin (1683-1752), with Chinese medical and pharmacological knowledge. A Neuchâtel bourgeois of Huguenot origin, who studied in Leiden with Hermann Boerhaave, Garcin spent nine years (1720-1729) in South and Southeast Asia as a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Upon his return to Neuchâtel in 1739 he became primus inter pares in the small local community of physician-botanists, introducing them to the artificial sexual system of classification. He practiced medicine, incorporating treatments acquired during his travels. taught botany, collected rare plants for major botanical gardens, and contributed to the Journal Helvetique on a range of topics; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, where two of his papers were read in translation and published in the Philosophical Transactions; one of these concerned the mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), leading Linnaeus to name the genus Garcinia after Garcin. He was likewise consulted as an expert on the East Indies, exotic flora, and medicines, and contributed to important publications on these topics. During his time with the Dutch East India Company Garcin encountered Chinese medical practitioners whose work he evaluated favourably as being on a par with that of the Brahmin physicians, whom he particularly esteemed. Yet Garcin never went to China, basing his entire experience of Chinese medical practice on what he witnessed in the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (the ‘East Indies’). This case demonstrates that there were myriad routes to Europeans developing an understanding of Chinese natural knowledge; the Chinese diaspora also afforded a valuable opportunity for comparisons of its knowledge and practice with other non-European bodies of medical and natural (e.g. pharmacological) knowledge.postprin