This chapter contains general or generic order sets for adults for vital signs, activity, diet, nursing interventions, respiratory interventions, laboratory tests, radiology studies, interventional radiology procedures, cardiac studies, stress tests, gastrointestinal studies, neurology studies, pulmonary studies, and various consultants

The chapter explores how Aristotle wants to account for perception’s essentially receptive nature. It focuses on Aristotle’s commitment to the passivity of perception, namely, the idea that perception is a certain kind of being affected (paskhein) by perceptual objects. It provides a classification and preliminary critical analysis of existing interpretations of the passivity of perception. I argue that Aristotle’s first general account of perception in An. 2.5 is systematically pre-causal in the sense that makes it impossible to directly infer from it anything specific about the respective roles of the body and the soul (against both Material and Psychic Interpretation). Furthermore, I contend that Aristotle develops a robust conception of passivity here that successfully encapsulates, on the most general level, what perception is (against Deflationary and Aporetic Interpretation). More specifically, I argue that An. 2.5 is centrally aimed at reconciling perception’s passivity and completeness (the perceiver has both seen and is seeing the same object) and that this task is motivated by the need for capturing the difference between genuine (‘continued’) perceiving and mere appearance within an assimilation model of perception.

The chapter provides a novel account of perceptual discrimination (krinein) in Aristotle. Against the widespread view that the most basic perceptual acts consist in noticing differences between two or more perceived qualities, I argue that discrimination is for Aristotle more like sifting, winnowing on a sieve: it consists in identifying – with an ultimate authority – the quality of an external object as distinct from any other quality of the given range that the object could have. The chapter further explores how the notion of discrimination is embedded by Aristotle within his causal assimilation model of perception. I argue that the central notion of a discriminative mean (mesotēs), introduced in An. 2.11, is intended to capture the role of the perceptive soul as the controlling factor of a homeostatic mechanism underlying perception. As such the notion lays the groundwork for resolving the apparent conflict between the passivity of perception and the impassivity of the soul (as analysed in Chapter 5). The prospect is further explored in Chapter 7. The present chapter concludes by arguing that Aristotle conceives perceptual discrimination as a holistic assessment of the external object acting on the perceiver, including those of its features which are not causally efficacious.

The chapter spells out the homeostatic model of how the soul is involved in perception introduced in Chapter 6, while addressing two main challenges for it. First, I argue that while the physiological details are not easy to tease out, there is no principal reason against Aristotle’s extension of the model from touch to other sense modalities. More importantly, I argue that we can understand the role of the perceptive soul as an extension of the model developed for the nutritive soul in An. 2.4 and based on Aristotle’s art analogy (from Phys. 2 and elsewhere). The upshot is that the basic perceptual acts are underlaid by bodily processes non-cognitively controlled by the soul. But while homeostasis is the aim of nutrition, in perception it only becomes a means for achieving something else, namely discrimination. The chapter closes by showing how the interpretation developed in this book pays off when it comes to understanding Aristotle’s two notoriously difficult concluding accounts: the account of perception as a reception of forms without the matter in An. 2.12 and the summarizing account of the cognitive soul in An. 3.8.

The chapter sheds fresh light on Aristotle’s account of perception by providing a novel analysis of the puzzles that he articulates within his discussion of the predecessors’ views, especially in An. 1. I argue that Aristotle takes the key insight of the traditional view that like is perceived by like to be expressed in the idea that the perceiver is like the perceptual object by which she is being affected. This idea seems inconsistent with the widely shared assumption that only unlike things can act upon each other. Aristotle’s predecessors were unable to resolve this tension (the notion of a generic likeness is of no help), but he believes that precisely this tension must be resolved by any successful account of what perception is. The only predecessor who at least hinted towards a resolution is Anaxagoras with his account of impassive nous (understood by Aristotle as a general account of cognition). But Anaxagoras failed to account for the causal aspects of cognition as a way of being affected by its object. Aristotle’s own account can be seen as an attempt to incorporate the true insights of both the view that in perception like is affected by like and the view that what perceives must be impassive.

The chapter provides a novel detailed analysis of one of the most discussed chapters in the Aristotelian corpus, namely An. 2.5. The central claim is that in An. 2.5 Aristotle lays down his programmatic definition of perception as a complete passive activity. He does so by classing the perceptive capacity with capacities that are already fulfilments (entelekheiai) of their subjects and by showing how this classification is compatible with perception being passive (i.e. a kind of being affected). By working out the concept of complete passive activity Aristotle fills in a conceptual gap left open elsewhere in the corpus (most strikingly in Metaphysics Θ.6), where both completeness and passivity are taken for granted but without showing how the two features can cohere. In An. 2.5, Aristotle, thus, succeeds in capturing how perception differs not only from manifestations of non-passive complete capacities (such as the art of house-building), but also from passive processes (as exhibited in the inexhaustibility of the perceptive capacity and the object-directedness of perception). His definition is programmatic in the sense that it analyses the explananda without, however, yet providing any explanantia.

The Conclusion sums up the main results of the study and their philosophical relevance. It focuses on the notion of complete passive activities; Aristotle’s integration of causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception; his dynamic account of perception, which defies the standard dichotomy between materialism and spiritualism; the central dilemma for Aristotle’s endeavour to explain perception, as well as the prospects of the homeostatic solution; and finally the promise of the present study to also provide the groundwork for a better understanding of Aristotle’s account of intellectual cognition.

The Introduction articulates the central question about the nature of perception and sets it within the explanatory project of Aristotle’s De Anima. What makes Aristotle’s account attractive, I argue, is that it strives to accommodate causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception. A central insight of Aristotle’s account is captured under the notion of perception as a complete passive activity, but that notion has, since late antiquity, appeared paradoxical to readers of De Anima and was, thus, systematically disregarded. The Introduction analyses the historical and philosophical reasons for this disregard. It further articulates the key dilemma pertaining to Aristotle’s view of the role played in perception by the soul: it should be the primary cause of an essentially passive and receptive activity, but it should itself remain unmoved and impassive; how can that be? Although this question has received relatively little attention among recent scholars, it is argued to be more crucial than the much-discussed issue of what happens in the perceiver’s sense organs. The final section of the Introduction outlines the argument of the entire book.

This final chapter shows how further enquiry into artefacts’ metaphysics forces us to return to artefacts’ physics. At the same time, this further enquiry is in turn shown to fall outside the interests of a metaphysician and to be the task of a natural philosopher. For this reason, the chapter looks at artefacts as objects of inquiry and distinguishes between perspective of the natural scientist, the maker, and the user on the one hand, and the perspective of the metaphysician on the other. This discussion allows us to wrap up the results, to reassess the relationship between the Physics and the Metaphysics, and to evaluate the respective contributions of these works to Aristotle’s ontology of artefacts.

We need theories that help us join the struggle for alternative futures. Cultural-historical approaches frame agency as something people do rather than something they have or sense. Building on this, I conceptualise agency in terms of the direction and reach of actions. Direction concerns movement from distinctive subject positionings towards desired endpoints. Reach concerns the extent of this movement. Direction and reach can be both outward (transforming the world) and inward (transforming the self). This acknowledges individuals’ contributions to changing their own lives and those of others without evacuating actions from the activities in which they are embedded. Motive, mediation, and motion are key to this. I illustrate these ideas in relation to existing research on young people’s environmental activism, a Latino boy in foster care, and a mother struggling to care for her infant child, as well as examples from prior research and other chapters in this volume.

African buffalo herd size varies across their distribution range from as few as 5–10 in the rainforests of West and Central Africa to as many as 2000 individuals in the floodplains of eastern and southern Africa. The home range size of African buffalo also varies greatly, with those of savanna buffalo herds generally ranging between 50 and 350 km2. The larger home ranges are generally observed in areas where resources are spatially segregated, and where herds are forced to undertake seasonal movements. In contrast, forest buffalo exhibit smaller home ranges (<10 km2) due to a less pronounced seasonality of the environment, and a more homogeneous spatial arrangement of resources. African buffalo are ruminants, essentially feeding on grass and roughage. This species is capable of subsisting on pastures too coarse and too tall for most other herbivores. The African buffalo occupies an important niche, opening up habitats that are preferred by short-grass grazers. Although the African buffalo primarily is a grazer, savanna buffalo can partially switch their diet to browse when grasses become tall and lignified. The ability of the African buffalo to cope with contrasting environmental conditions throughout most sub-Saharan ecosystems, by modulating a large array of biological traits, highlights a high degree of behavioural plasticity.

Actions are not merely what we do but essentially connected with intentionality, particularly beliefs and intentions, and thereby with the will. Some actions are basic; others we do by doing something basically – “at will.” Act-types are the kind of thing we can exemplify repeatedly or multiple agents can exemplify simultaneously, say speaking. Act-tokens are individual actions tied to a particular agent, time, and mode of performance. Ethics must address both: types as contents of intentions and primary indicators of obligations, and tokens as morally significant in ways that, like their underlying motives, are not fixed by their type. This chapter also clarifies control of action, direct and indirect. It is not just basic acts that are under direct voluntary control; most of the salient manners of our actions are. Moral obligation and moral responsibility for action extend to those as well as to the acts they color – or discolor.