SO survey of massive cores

We present the results of a survey of several tens of dense high mass star forming (HMSF) cores in three transitions of the SO molecule at 30 and 100 GHz with the 100-m Effelsberg and 20-m Onsala radio telescopes. The physical parameters of the cores are estimated from the line ratios and column densities. Relative abundances are derived as well.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figues, to be published in Proceedings of the IAU Symposium No. 332 "Astrochemistry VII - Through the Cosmos from Galaxies to Planets

CS in nearby galaxies: Distribution, kinematics, and multilevel studies

As a result of observations at the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (IRAM) 30-m telescope, maps of the distribution of the J = 2-1 transition of CS toward the galaxies IC 342 and NGC 253 are presented. The distribution of the CS emission from NGC 253 is consistent with the CO 1-0 line. The distribution of the CS emission from IC 342, however, resembles more that seen in the CO 3-2 line. For the first time, the detection of the isotopic substitution C-34S is reported toward an external galaxy: The C-34S 2-1 line has been detected toward NGC 253 and M 82 and the C-34S line has been detected tentatively toward M 82. Also for the first time, extragalactic CS has been observed in the 3-2 (toward NGC 253, IC 342 and M 82) and 5-4 (NGC 253 and IC 342) transitions

The molecular cloud content of early type galaxies

A survey of the CO content of early type galaxies led to 24 new detections, mostly lenticular galaxies. The galaxies, which are situated in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, were selected as being far-IR luminous compared to their blue luminosity, and situated at distances less than about 50 Mpc (H sub o=100 km/s Mpc(-1). Results for some early galaxies (NGC 404, NGC 3593 and NGC 4369 are given

The last of his kind? Gottfried Ploucquet’s occasionalism and the grounding of sense-perception

Sufficiently grounding the origin of sense-perceptions in the mind is an issue that has concerned philosophers for a long time, and remains an issue even today. In eighteenth-century Germany prior to the publication of Kant’s Critical philosophy, the two main competing theories to causally ground sense-perceptions were pre-established harmony and physical influx, the latter of which ultimately carried the day. A third option had been around in the seventeenth century: occasionalism. However, historians of philosophy believe this option to have entirely disappeared in the eighteenth century. I will show that this is not the case. In this paper, I focus on one influential German occasionalist: Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–90). Ploucquet not only criticizes Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony for providing an ultimately ungrounded, subjective, and arbitrary account of the origin of sense-perceptions, but also presents his own daring alternative: a representationalist-occasionalist theory that locates the objective ground of sense-perceptions in the divine mind.</p

Grounding the World:the Dissemination of Occasionalism in Early Modern Germany

This dissertation analyses how occasionalism provides a solid metaphysical foundation for early modern natural philosophy. Occasionalism is the doctrine which, in its strongest and most universal form, maintains that only God has causal power and that finite beings, typically both minds and bodies, are purely passive. The main historical and conceptual focus of this dissertation is on the rise and fall of occasionalism in early modern Germany. The first chapter is dedicated to Géraud de Cordemoy’s (1626–1684) ultimately politically motivated project of explaining human reality, and it is intended as a prelude to the discussion of the German debate about occasionalism in the rest of the dissertation. The second chapter investigates Johann Christoph Sturm’s (1635–1703) eclectic reconciliation of ‘old’ (scholastic) and ‘new’ (mechanical) natural philosophy by means of occasionalism. The third chapter studies the early Christian Wolff’s (1679–1754) endorsement of occasionalism to account for the phenomenon of speech, along with the reasons for his later dismissal of this doctrine. The case of Wolff is presented as a turning point in the history of German occasionalism. The fourth and last chapter aims to explain occasionalism’s fall from grace in the eighteenth-century German causation debate. It focuses on several influential university professors, such as Martin Knutzen (1713–1751), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–1790), and the pre-Critical Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and claims that all of them (bracketing off the early Ploucquet) took occasionalism to be in violation of a non-transcendental (this-worldly) explanation of nature itself