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178-544: After her death, the narrator marries the Lady Rowena. Rowena becomes ill, and she dies as well. The distraught narrator stays with her body overnight and watches as Rowena slowly comes back from the dead – though she has transformed into Ligeia. The story may be the narrator's opium -induced hallucination, and there is debate whether the story was a satire . After the story's first publication in The American Museum , it

356-745: A system of 12 categories , divided into the four classes: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. More recent theories of categories were proposed by C. S. Peirce , Edmund Husserl , Samuel Alexander , Roderick Chisholm , and E. J. Lowe . Many philosophers rely on the contrast between concrete and abstract objects . According to a common view, concrete objects, like rocks, trees, and human beings, exist in space and time, undergo changes, and impact each other as cause and effect. They contrast with abstract objects, like numbers and sets , which do not exist in space and time, are immutable, and do not engage in causal relations. Particulars are individual entities and include both concrete objects, like Aristotle,

534-596: A branch of the Government of China's exchequer, to arrange for silver currency to be transported to Baotou to use it to sponsor the trade. The opium trade under the Chinese Communist Party was important to its finances in the 1940s. Peter Vladimirov 's diary provided a first hand account. Chen Yung-fa provided a detailed historical account of how the opium trade was essential to the economy of Yan'an during this period. Mitsubishi and Mitsui were involved in

712-493: A crime to sell opiates without a prescription, and bans on possession of opium or opium pipes in 1909 were enacted. At the US federal level, the legal actions taken reflected constitutional restrictions under the enumerated powers doctrine prior to reinterpretation of the commerce clause , which did not allow the federal government to enact arbitrary prohibitions, but did permit arbitrary taxation. Beginning in 1883, opium importation

890-419: A famous sword, within the pommel of which he kept "Stones of Immortality" compounded from opium thebaicum, citrus juice, and "quintessence of gold". The name "Paracelsus" was a pseudonym signifying him the equal or better of Aulus Cornelius Celsus , whose text, which described the use of opium or a similar preparation, had recently been translated and reintroduced to medieval Europe. The Canon of Medicine ,

1068-400: A fire, is always followed by another phenomenon, like a feeling of pain. According to nomic regularity theories, regularities manifest as laws of nature studied by science. Counterfactual theories focus not on regularities but on how effects depend on their causes. They state that effects owe their existence to the cause and would not occur without them. According to primitivism, causation

1246-414: A gradual continuum. The word metaphysics has its origin in the ancient Greek words metá ( μετά , meaning ' after ' , ' above ' , and ' beyond' ' ) and phusiká ( φυσικά ), as a short form of ta metá ta phusiká , meaning ' what comes after the physics ' . This is often interpreted to mean that metaphysics discusses topics that, due to their generality and comprehensiveness, lie beyond

1424-422: A higher degree of existence than matter, which can only imperfectly reflect Platonic forms. Another key concern in metaphysics is the division of entities into distinct groups based on underlying features they share. Theories of categories provide a system of the most fundamental kinds or the highest genera of being by establishing a comprehensive inventory of everything. One of the earliest theories of categories

1602-563: A key role in ethics regarding the moral responsibility people have for what they do. Identity is a relation that every entity has to itself as a form of sameness. It refers to numerical identity when the same entity is involved, as in the statement "the morning star is the evening star " (both are the planet Venus ). In a slightly different sense, it encompasses qualitative identity, also called exact similarity and indiscernibility , which occurs when two distinct entities are exactly alike, such as perfect identical twins. The principle of

1780-475: A long history in metaphysics, meta-metaphysics has only recently developed into a systematic field of inquiry. Metaphysicians often regard existence or being as one of the most basic and general concepts. To exist means to form part of reality , distinguishing real entities from imaginary ones. According to the orthodox view, existence is a property of properties: if an entity exists then its properties are instantiated. A different position states that existence

1958-473: A person's home servings of opium were offered as a form of greeting and politeness. Often served with tea (in China) and with specific and fine utensils and beautifully carved wooden pipes. The wealthier the smoker, the finer and more expensive material used in ceremony. The image of seedy underground, destitute smokers were often generated by anti-opium narratives and became a more accurate image of opium use following

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2136-475: A poem titled " The Conqueror Worm " which depicts her mental state and the resignation of her mortal being. The narrator, grief-stricken, buys and refurbishes an abbey in England . The narrator enters into a loveless marriage with "the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine ". In the second month of the marriage, Rowena begins to suffer from worsening anxiety and fever . One night, when she

2314-496: A poison. Avicenna describes several methods of delivery and recommendations for doses of the drug. This classic text was translated into Latin in 1175 and later into many other languages and remained authoritative until the 19th century. Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu used opium in the 14th-century Ottoman Empire to treat migraine headaches, sciatica , and other painful ailments. Manuscripts of Pseudo-Apuleius 's 5th-century work from

2492-479: A priori methods have been the dominant approach. They rely on rational intuition and abstract reasoning from general principles rather than sensory experience . A posteriori approaches, by contrast, ground metaphysical theories in empirical observations and scientific theories. Some metaphysicians incorporate perspectives from fields such as physics , psychology , linguistics , and history into their inquiry. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive: it

2670-475: A priori reasoning and view metaphysics as a practice continuous with the empirical sciences that generalizes their insights while making their underlying assumptions explicit. This approach is known as naturalized metaphysics and is closely associated with the work of Willard Van Orman Quine . He relies on the idea that true sentences from the sciences and other fields have ontological commitments , that is, they imply that certain entities exist. For example, if

2848-465: A single cloud is an overlay of countless clouds, one for each cloud-like collection of water droplets. Mereological moderatists hold that certain conditions must be met for a group of entities to compose a whole, for example, that the entities touch one another. Mereological nihilists reject the idea of wholes altogether, claiming that there are no clouds or tables but only particles that are arranged cloud-wise or table-wise. A related mereological problem

3026-475: A slower possession in " Morella ". Poe also wrote that he should have had the Ligeia-possessed Rowena relapse to her true self so that she could be entombed as Rowena, "the bodily alterations having gradually faded away". However, in a subsequent letter he retracted this statement. There has been some debate that Poe may have intended "Ligeia" to be a satire of Gothic fiction . The year that "Ligeia"

3204-467: A solution of opium in ethanol , which Paracelsus has been credited with developing. During his lifetime, Paracelsus was viewed as an adventurer who challenged the theories and mercenary motives of contemporary medicine with dangerous chemical therapies, but his therapies marked a turning point in Western medicine. In the 1660s, laudanum was recommended for pain, sleeplessness, and diarrhea by Thomas Sydenham ,

3382-402: A statement is possibly true if it is true in at least one possible world, whereas it is necessarily true if it is true in all possible worlds. Modal realists argue that possible worlds exist as concrete entities in the same sense as the actual world, with the main difference being that the actual world is the world we live in while other possible worlds are inhabited by counterparts . This view

3560-460: A substantial success, with a cessation of direct British opium exports to China (but not Hong Kong) and most provinces declared free of opium production. Nonetheless, the success of the program was only temporary, with opium use rapidly increasing during the disorder following the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916. Opium farming also increased, peaking in 1930 when the League of Nations singled China out as

3738-464: A substratum, also called bare particular , together with various properties. The substratum confers individuality to the particular while the properties express its qualitative features or what it is like. This approach is rejected by bundle theorists , who state that particulars are only bundles of properties without an underlying substratum. Some bundle theorists include in the bundle an individual essence, called haecceity , to ensure that each bundle

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3916-461: A term from German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 's theodicy , many metaphysicians use the concept of possible worlds to analyze the meaning and ontological ramifications of modal statements. A possible world is a complete and consistent way the totality of things could have been. For example, the dinosaurs were wiped out in the actual world but there are possible worlds in which they are still alive. According to possible world semantics,

4094-606: A treatise, al-Tasrif , that influenced medical thought well into the 16th century. The Persian physician Abū ‘Alī al-Husayn ibn Sina ("Avicenna") described opium as the most powerful of the stupefacients, in comparison to mandrake and other highly effective herbs, in The Canon of Medicine . The text lists medicinal effects of opium, such as analgesia, hypnosis, antitussive effects, gastrointestinal effects, cognitive effects, respiratory depression, neuromuscular disturbances, and sexual dysfunction. It also refers to opium's potential as

4272-401: A truthmaker for the statement "a tomato is red". Based on this observation, it is possible to pursue metaphysical research by asking what the truthmakers of statements are, with different areas of metaphysics being dedicated to different types of statements. According to this view, modal metaphysics asks what makes statements about what is possible and necessary true while the metaphysics of time

4450-621: A unified dimension rather than as independent dimensions. Empirically focused metaphysicians often rely on scientific theories to ground their theories about the nature of reality in empirical observations. Similar issues arise in the social sciences where metaphysicians investigate their basic concepts and analyze their metaphysical implications. This includes questions like whether social facts emerge from non-social facts, whether social groups and institutions have mind-independent existence, and how they persist through time. Metaphysical assumptions and topics in psychology and psychiatry include

4628-506: Is a "word of no meaning". The story also suggests Ligeia is a transcendentalist , a group of people Poe often criticized. Roger Corman adapted the story into The Tomb of Ligeia in 1964. It would be the last of Corman's eight film adaptations of works by Edgar Allan Poe . Ligeia's theme of the death and resurrection of a beloved woman was subsequently developed by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo . In 1978, composer Georges Aperghis adapted

4806-399: Is a basic concept that cannot be analyzed in terms of non-causal concepts, such as regularities or dependence relations. One form of primitivism identifies causal powers inherent in entities as the underlying mechanism. Eliminativists reject the above theories by holding that there is no causation. Mind encompasses phenomena like thinking , perceiving , feeling , and desiring as well as

4984-435: Is a fundamental aspect of reality, meaning that besides facts about what is the case, there are additional facts about what could or must be the case. A different view argues that modal truths are not about an independent aspect of reality but can be reduced to non-modal characteristics, for example, to facts about what properties or linguistic descriptions are compatible with each other or to fictional statements . Borrowing

5162-521: Is a property of individuals, meaning that it is similar to other properties, such as shape or size. It is controversial whether all entities have this property. According to Alexius Meinong , there are nonexistent objects , including merely possible objects like Santa Claus and Pegasus . A related question is whether existence is the same for all entities or whether there are different modes or degrees of existence. For instance, Plato held that Platonic forms , which are perfect and immutable ideas, have

5340-442: Is a well-known principle that gives preference to simple theories, in particular, those that assume that few entities exist. Other principles consider explanatory power , theoretical usefulness, and proximity to established beliefs. Despite its status as one of the main branches of philosophy, metaphysics has received numerous criticisms questioning its legitimacy as a field of inquiry. One criticism argues that metaphysical inquiry

5518-478: Is about to faint, the narrator pours her a goblet of wine. Drugged with opium , he sees (or thinks he sees) drops of "a brilliant and ruby colored fluid" fall into the goblet. Her condition rapidly worsens, and a few days later she dies and her body is wrapped for burial. As the narrator keeps vigil overnight, he notices a brief return of color to Rowena's cheeks. She repeatedly shows signs of reviving, before relapsing into apparent death. As he attempts resuscitation,

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5696-458: Is close to the western lands of Xiyu . A century later, Li Shizhen listed standard medical uses of opium in his renowned Compendium of Materia Medica (1578), but also wrote that "lay people use it for the art of sex," in particular the ability to "arrest seminal emission". This association of opium with sex continued in China until the end of the 19th century. Opium smoking began as a privilege of

5874-440: Is controversial and various alternatives have been suggested, for example, that possible worlds only exist as abstract objects or are similar to stories told in works of fiction . Space and time are dimensions that entities occupy. Spacetime realists state that space and time are fundamental aspects of reality and exist independently of the human mind. Spacetime idealists, by contrast, hold that space and time are constructs of

6052-401: Is determined. Hard determinists infer from this that there is no free will, whereas libertarians conclude that determinism must be false. Compatibilists offer a third perspective, arguing that determinism and free will do not exclude each other, for instance, because a person can still act in tune with their motivation and choices even if they are determined by other forces. Free will plays

6230-400: Is divided into subdisciplines based on the perspective they take. Metaphysical cosmology examines changeable things and investigates how they are connected to form a world as a totality extending through space and time. Rational psychology focuses on metaphysical foundations and problems concerning the mind, such as its relation to matter and the freedom of the will. Natural theology studies

6408-436: Is fundamentally neither material nor mental and suggest that matter and mind are both derivative phenomena. A key aspect of the mind–body problem is the hard problem of consciousness or how to explain that physical systems like brains can produce phenomenal consciousness. The status of free will as the ability of a person to choose their actions is a central aspect of the mind–body problem. Metaphysicians are interested in

6586-420: Is impossible because humans lack the cognitive capacities needed to access the ultimate nature of reality. This line of thought leads to skepticism about the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. Empiricists often follow this idea, like Hume, who argued that there is no good source of metaphysical knowledge since metaphysics lies outside the field of empirical knowledge and relies on dubious intuitions about

6764-434: Is interested in the truthmakers of temporal statements about the past, present, and future. A closely related topic concerns the nature of truth. Theories of truth aim to determine this nature and include correspondence , coherence , pragmatic , semantic , and deflationary theories . Metaphysicians employ a variety of methods to develop metaphysical theories and formulate arguments for and against them. Traditionally,

6942-468: Is made up of only one kind. According to idealism , everything is mental, including physical objects, which may be understood as ideas or perceptions of conscious minds. Materialists, by contrast, state that all reality is at its core material. Some deny that mind exists but the more common approach is to explain mind in terms of certain aspects of matter, such as brain states, behavioral dispositions , or functional roles. Neutral monists argue that reality

7120-479: Is more fundamental than other forms of philosophical inquiry. Metaphysics encompasses a wide range of general and abstract topics. It investigates the nature of existence , the features all entities have in common, and their division into categories of being . An influential division is between particulars and universals . Particulars are individual unique entities, like a specific apple. Universals are general features that different particulars have in common, like

7298-419: Is no consensus about the validity of these criticisms and whether they affect metaphysics as a whole or only certain issues or approaches in it. For example, it could be the case that certain metaphysical disputes are merely verbal while others are substantive. Metaphysics is related to many fields of inquiry by investigating their basic concepts and relation to the fundamental structure of reality. For example,

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7476-668: Is not conclusive as Poe "always busy accusing others of plagiarism, was careful to conceal his own borrowings". Scholar Heide Crawford writes that Poe is likely to have borrowed, or to have been influenced by "Wake Not the Dead" as translated into English in Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823) or Legends of Terror! (1826), both of which published the story without attribution, which may explain why Poe does not mention anyone as an inspiration for "Ligeia". The poem within

7654-575: Is not conventional. He describes her as emaciated, with some "strangeness". He describes her face in detail, from her "faultless" forehead to the "divine orbs" of her eyes. They marry, and Ligeia impresses her husband with her immense knowledge of physical and mathematical science, and her proficiency in classical languages. She begins to show her husband her knowledge of metaphysical and "forbidden" wisdom. After an unspecified length of time Ligeia becomes ill, struggles internally with human mortality, and ultimately dies. Shortly before her death, she composes

7832-411: Is one of the oldest branches of philosophy . The precise nature of metaphysics is disputed and its characterization has changed in the course of history. Some approaches see metaphysics as a unified field and give a wide-sweeping definition by understanding it as the study of "fundamental questions about the nature of reality" or as an inquiry into the essences of things. Another approach doubts that

8010-408: Is opposed by so-called serious metaphysicians , who contend that metaphysical disputes are about substantial features of the underlying structure of reality. A closely related debate between ontological realists and anti-realists concerns the question of whether there are any objective facts that determine which metaphysical theories are true. A different criticism, formulated by pragmatists , sees

8188-457: Is possible to combine elements from both. The method a metaphysician chooses often depends on their understanding of the nature of metaphysics, for example, whether they see it as an inquiry into the mind-independent structure of reality, as metaphysical realists claim, or the principles underlying thought and experience, as some metaphysical anti-realists contend. A priori approaches often rely on intuitions—non-inferential impressions about

8366-448: Is rejected by probabilistic theories , which claim that the cause merely increases the probability that the effect occurs. This view can explain that smoking causes cancer even though this does not happen in every single case. The regularity theory of causation , inspired by David Hume 's philosophy, states that causation is nothing but a constant conjunction in which the mind apprehends that one phenomenon, like putting one's hand in

8544-505: Is repeated in the body of the story, is attributed to Joseph Glanvill , though this quotation has not been found in Glanvill's extant work. Poe may have fabricated the quote and attached Glanvill's name in order to associate with Glanvill's belief in witchcraft . Ligeia and Rowena serve as aesthetic opposites: Ligeia is raven-haired from a city by the Rhine while Rowena (believed to be named after

8722-414: Is studied by mereology . The problem of the many is a philosophical question about the conditions under which several individual things compose a larger whole. For example, a cloud comprises many droplets without a clear boundary, raising the question of which droplets form part of the cloud. According to mereological universalists, every collection of entities forms a whole. This means that what seems to be

8900-406: Is the cause and the spill is the effect. Besides the single-case causation between particulars in this example, there is also general-case causation expressed in statements such as "smoking causes cancer". The term agent causation is used when people and their actions cause something. Causation is usually interpreted deterministically, meaning that a cause always brings about its effect. This view

9078-417: Is the most basic inquiry upon which all other branches of philosophy depend in some way. Metaphysics is traditionally understood as a study of mind-independent features of reality. Starting with Immanuel Kant 's critical philosophy , an alternative conception gained prominence that focuses on conceptual schemes rather than external reality. Kant distinguishes transcendent metaphysics, which aims to describe

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9256-450: Is unclear, however, if it is Ligeia's will or her husband's will that brings Ligeia back from the dead. Her illness may have been consumption . Professor Paul Lewis notes the close parallels between "Ligeia" and Ernst Raupach 's " Wake Not the Dead " (1823), saying that the two tales deal with "almost identical material in radically different ways". Lewis concludes that while there are no sources that confirm Poe read Raupach's story, this

9434-399: Is unique. Another proposal for concrete particulars is that they are individuated by their space-time location. Concrete particulars encountered in everyday life, like rocks, tables, and organisms, are complex entities composed of various parts. For example, a table consists of a tabletop and legs, each of which is itself made up of countless particles. The relation between parts and wholes

9612-465: Is whether there are simple entities that have no parts, as atomists claim, or whether everything can be endlessly subdivided into smaller parts, as continuum theorists contend. Universals are general entities, encompassing both properties and relations , that express what particulars are like and how they resemble one another. They are repeatable, meaning that they are not limited to a unique existent but can be instantiated by different particulars at

9790-590: The New World (February 15, 1845), and the Broadway Journal (September 27, 1845). The poem " The Conqueror Worm " was first incorporated into the text (as a poem composed by Ligeia) in the New World . Charles Eames of The New World commented: "The force and boldness of the conception and the high artistic skill, with which the writer's purpose is wrought out, are equally admirable". Thomas Dunn English , writing in

9968-646: The British Parliament to stop the opium trade. He and James Laidlaw Maxwell appealed to the London Missionary Conference of 1888 and the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 to condemn the continuation of the trade. When Broomhall was dying, his son Marshall read to him from The Times the welcome news that an agreement had been signed ensuring the end of the opium trade within two years. Official Chinese resistance to opium

10146-617: The Drug Enforcement Administration under the Controlled Substances Act . Metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality . It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some theorists view it as an inquiry into the fundamental categories of human understanding. Some philosophers, including Aristotle , designate metaphysics as first philosophy to suggest that it

10324-504: The Guominjun reversed his policy; by 1933, people from every level of society were abusing the drug, and Ningxia was left in destitution. In 1923, an officer of the Bank of China from Baotou found out that Ma Fuxiang was assisting the drug trade in opium which helped finance his military expenses. He earned US$ 2   million from taxing those sales in 1923. General Ma had been using the bank,

10502-576: The Indies is retailed with greater profit by the Batavians than opium, which [its] users cannot do without, nor can they come by it except it be brought by the ships of the Batavians from Bengal and Coromandel ." Fueled in part by the 1729 ban on madak , which at first effectively exempted pure opium as a potentially medicinal product, the smoking of pure opium became more popular in the 18th century. In 1736,

10680-512: The Neolithic age with purposes such as food, anaesthetics , and ritual . Evidence from ancient Greece indicates that opium was consumed in several ways, including inhalation of vapors, suppositories , medical poultices , and as a combination with hemlock for suicide. Opium is mentioned in the most important medical texts of the ancient and medieval world, including the Ebers Papyrus and

10858-567: The Phoenicians and Minoans to destinations around the Mediterranean Sea , including Greece, Carthage , and Europe. By 1100   BCE, opium was cultivated on Cyprus , where surgical-quality knives were used to score the poppy pods, and opium was cultivated, traded, and smoked. Opium was also mentioned after the Persian conquest of Assyria and Babylonian lands in the 6th century BC . From

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11036-468: The Second Opium War in 1858, China was forced to legalize opium and began massive domestic production. Importation of opium peaked in 1879 at 6,700 tons, and by 1906, China was producing 85 percent of the world's opium, some 35,000 tons, and 27 percent of its adult male population regularly used opium‍—‌13.5   million people consuming 39,000 tons of opium yearly. From 1880 to the beginning of

11214-500: The Upanishads in ancient India , Daoism in ancient China , and pre-Socratic philosophy in ancient Greece . During the subsequent medieval period in the West, discussions about the nature of universals were influenced by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The modern period saw the emergence of various comprehensive systems of metaphysics, many of which embraced idealism . In

11392-657: The Yongzheng Emperor to 1,000 under the Qianlong Emperor , 4,000 under the Jiaqing Emperor , and 30,000 under the Daoguang Emperor . This illegal sale of opium, which has been called "the most long continued and systematic international crime of modern times", became one of the world's most valuable single commodity trades, and between 1814 and 1850, sucked out 11 percent of China's money supply. In response to

11570-528: The "nervous exhaustion" suffered by many a white-collar worker in the increasingly hectic and industrialized U.S. life—the most likely potential clients of physicians. Soldiers returning home from the Crusades in the 11th to 13th century brought opium with them. Opium is said to have been used for recreational purposes from the 14th century onwards in Muslim societies. Ottoman and European testimonies confirm that from

11748-497: The 10th and 11th centuries refer to the use of wild poppy Papaver agreste or Papaver rhoeas (identified as P. silvaticum ) instead of P. somniferum for inducing sleep and relieving pain. The use of Paracelsus ' laudanum was introduced to Western medicine in 1527, when Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known by the name Paracelsus, claimed (dubiously) to have returned from wanderings in Arabia with

11926-606: The 16th to the 19th centuries Anatolian opium was eaten in Constantinople as much as it was exported to Europe. In 1573, for instance, a Venetian visitor to the Ottoman Empire observed many of the Turkish natives of Constantinople regularly drank a "certain black water made with opium" that makes them feel good, but to which they become so addicted, if they try to go without, they will "quickly die". From drinking it, dervishes claimed

12104-453: The 1820s. Portuguese traders also brought opium from the independent Malwa states of western India, although by 1820, the British were able to restrict this trade by charging "pass duty" on the opium when it was forced to pass through Bombay to reach an entrepot . Despite drastic penalties and continued prohibition of opium until 1860, opium smuggling rose steadily from 200 chests per year under

12282-532: The 19th century, "any respectable person" could purchase a range of hashish pastes and (later) morphine with complementary injection kit. Thomas De Quincey 's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), one of the first and most famous literary accounts of opium addiction written from the point of view of an addict, details the pleasures and dangers of the drug. In the book, it is not Ottoman, nor Chinese, addicts about whom he writes, but English opium users: "I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered

12460-404: The 20th century, traditional metaphysics in general and idealism in particular faced various criticisms, which prompted new approaches to metaphysical inquiry. Metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality , including existence , objects and their properties , possibility and necessity, space and time , change, causation , and the relation between matter and mind . It

12638-475: The British, which led to a decrease of the British silver stocks. Therefore, the British tried to encourage Chinese opium use to enhance their balance, and they delivered it from Indian provinces under British control. In India, its cultivation, as well as the manufacture and traffic to China, were subject to the British East India Company (BEIC), as a strict monopoly of the British government. There

12816-626: The Chinese border into the Golden Triangle region. The remnant opium trade primarily served Southeast Asia, but spread to American soldiers during the Vietnam War ; based on a study of opiate use in soldiers returning to the United States in 1971, 20 percent of participants were dependent enough to experience withdrawal symptoms. There were no legal restrictions on the importation or use of opium in

12994-459: The Chinese manner of opium smoking, and the social traditions of the opium den . The Indian Diaspora distributed opium-eaters in the same way, and both social groups survived as " lascars " (seamen) and " coolies " (manual laborers). French sailors provided another major group of opium smokers, having gotten the habit while in French Indochina , where the drug was promoted and monopolized by

13172-486: The Communist era, the British attempted to discourage the use of opium in China, but this effectively promoted the use of morphine, heroin, and cocaine, further exacerbating the problem of addiction. Scientific evidence of the pernicious nature of opium use was largely undocumented in the 1890s, when Protestant missionaries in China decided to strengthen their opposition to the trade by compiling data which would demonstrate

13350-621: The Eiffel Tower, or a specific apple, and abstract objects, like the number 2 or a specific set in mathematics. Also called individuals , they are unique, non-repeatable entities and contrast with universals , like the color red, which can at the same time exist in several places and characterize several particulars. A widely held view is that particulars instantiate universals but are not themselves instantiated by something else, meaning that they exist in themselves while universals exist in something else. Substratum theory analyzes each particular as

13528-514: The English language through the Latin word metaphysica . The nature of metaphysics can also be characterized in relation to its main branches. An influential division from early modern philosophy distinguishes between general and special or specific metaphysics. General metaphysics, also called ontology , takes the widest perspective and studies the most fundamental aspects of being. It investigates

13706-640: The October 1845 Aristidean , said that "Ligeia" was "the most extraordinary, of its kind, of his productions". Critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw said, "The story of the Lady Ligeia is not merely one of the wonders of literature: it is unparalleled and unapproached". The narrator relies on Ligeia as if he were a child, looking on her with "child-like confidence". On her death, he is "a child groping benighted" with "childlike perversity". Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman notes that, despite this dependency on her,

13884-643: The Rev. Griffith John , London Mission Society in Hankou . These missionaries were generally outraged over the British government's Royal Commission on Opium visiting India but not China. Accordingly, the missionaries first organized the Anti-Opium League in China among their colleagues in every mission station in China. American missionary Hampden Coit DuBose acted as first president. This organization, which had elected national officers and held an annual national meeting,

14062-598: The September 18, 1838, edition of the American Museum , a magazine edited by two of Poe's friends, Dr. Nathan C. Brooks and Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass. The magazine paid Poe $ 10 for "Ligeia". The story was extensively revised throughout its publication history. It was reprinted in the first volume of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), the one volume of Phantasy Pieces (1842), and Tales by Edgar Allan Poe (1845),

14240-403: The United States in the late 19th century and between two-thirds and three-quarters of these addicts were women. Opium addiction in the later 19th century received a hereditary definition. Dr. George Beard in 1869 proposed his theory of neurasthenia , a hereditary nervous system deficiency that could predispose an individual to addiction. Neurasthenia was increasingly tied in medical rhetoric to

14418-574: The United States until the San Francisco Opium Den Ordinance, which banned dens for public smoking of opium in 1875, a measure fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment and the perception that whites were starting to frequent the dens. This was followed by an 1891 California law requiring that narcotics carry warning labels and that their sales be recorded in a registry; amendments to the California Pharmacy and Poison Act in 1907 made it

14596-402: The abstract nature of its topic, metaphysics has received criticisms questioning the reliability of its methods and the meaningfulness of its theories. Metaphysics is relevant to many fields of inquiry that often implicitly rely on metaphysical concepts and assumptions. The roots of metaphysics lie in antiquity with speculations about the nature and origin of the universe, like those found in

14774-430: The average person thinks about an issue. For example, common-sense philosophers have argued that mereological nihilism is false since it implies that commonly accepted things, like tables, do not exist. Conceptual analysis , a method particularly prominent in analytic philosophy , aims to decompose metaphysical concepts into component parts to clarify their meaning and identify essential relations. In phenomenology ,

14952-422: The basis of a craft of "paste-scooping" by which servant girls could become prostitutes as the opportunity arose. The Chinese Diaspora in the West (1800s to 1949) first began to flourish during the 19th century due to famine and political upheaval, as well as rumors of wealth to be had outside of Southeast Asia . Chinese emigrants to cities such as San Francisco , London , and New York City brought with them

15130-506: The character in Ivanhoe ) is a blonde Anglo-Saxon . This symbolic opposition implies the contrast between German and English romanticism . Exactly what Poe was trying to depict in the metamorphosis scene has been debated, fueled in part by one of Poe's personal letters in which he denies that Ligeia was reborn in Rowena's body (a statement he later retracts). If Rowena had actually transformed into

15308-502: The cheap opium with costly silver, began the First Opium War in 1840, the British winning Hong Kong and trade concessions in the first of a series of Unequal Treaties . The opium trade incurred intense enmity from the later British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone . As a member of Parliament, Gladstone called it "most infamous and atrocious" referring to the opium trade between China and British India in particular. Gladstone

15486-562: The colonial government as a source of revenue. Among white Europeans, opium was more frequently consumed as laudanum or in patent medicines . Britain's All-India Opium Act of 1878 formalized ethnic restrictions on the use of opium, limiting recreational opium sales to registered Indian opium-eaters and Chinese opium-smokers only and prohibiting its sale to workers from Burma. Likewise, in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants were permitted to smoke opium, so long as they refrained from doing so in

15664-615: The color red . Modal metaphysics examines what it means for something to be possible or necessary. Metaphysicians also explore the concepts of space, time, and change , and their connection to causality and the laws of nature . Other topics include how mind and matter are related , whether everything in the world is predetermined , and whether there is free will . Metaphysicians use various methods to conduct their inquiry. Traditionally, they rely on rational intuitions and abstract reasoning but have recently included empirical approaches associated with scientific theories. Due to

15842-762: The committee were John Glasgow Kerr , MD, American Presbyterian Mission in Guangzhou (Canton); B.C. Atterbury, MD , American Presbyterian Mission in Beijing (Peking); Archdeacon Arthur E. Moule , Church Missionary Society in Shanghai ; Henry Whitney, MD, American Board of Commissioners for foreign Missions in Fuzhou ; the Rev. Samuel Clarke, China Inland Mission in Guiyang ; the Rev. Arthur Gostick Shorrock , English Baptist Mission in Taiyuan ; and

16020-404: The concepts of truth , truth-bearer , and truthmaker to conduct their inquiry. Truth is a property of being in accord with reality. Truth-bearers are entities that can be true or false, such as linguistic statements and mental representations. A truthmaker of a statement is the entity whose existence makes the statement true. For example, the fact that a tomato exists and that it is red acts as

16198-763: The correctness of specific claims or general principles. For example, arguments for the A-theory of time , which states that time flows from the past through the present and into the future, often rely on pre-theoretical intuitions associated with the sense of the passage of time. Some approaches use intuitions to establish a small set of self-evident fundamental principles, known as axioms , and employ deductive reasoning to build complex metaphysical systems by drawing conclusions from these axioms. Intuition-based approaches can be combined with thought experiments , which help evoke and clarify intuitions by linking them to imagined situations. They use counterfactual thinking to assess

16376-402: The dead Ligeia, it is only evidenced in the words of the narrator, leaving room to question its validity. The narrator has already been established as an opium addict, making him an unreliable narrator . The narrator early in the story describes Ligeia's beauty as "the radiance of an opium-dream". He also tells us that "in the excitement of my opium dreams, I would call aloud upon her name, during

16554-460: The death of Helen Burns in Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre ). Instead, Ligeia speaks of fear personified in the "blood-red thing". Other interpretations have been suggested however. Poe's friend and fellow Southern writer Philip Pendleton Cooke suggested the story would have been more artistic if Rowena's possession by Ligeia had been more gradual; Poe later agreed, though he had already used

16732-452: The different areas of metaphysics share a set of underlying features and provides instead a fine-grained characterization by listing all the main topics investigated by metaphysicians. Some definitions are descriptive by providing an account of what metaphysicians do while others are normative and prescribe what metaphysicians ought to do. Two historically influential definitions in ancient and medieval philosophy understand metaphysics as

16910-496: The divine and its role as the first cause. The scope of special metaphysics overlaps with other philosophical disciplines, making it unclear whether a topic belongs to it or to areas like philosophy of mind and theology . Applied metaphysics is a relatively young subdiscipline. It belongs to applied philosophy and studies the applications of metaphysics, both within philosophy and other fields of inquiry. In areas like ethics and philosophy of religion , it addresses topics like

17088-404: The drug. Action against opium farmers centered upon a highly repressive incarnation of law enforcement in which rural populations had their property destroyed, their land confiscated and/or were publicly tortured, humiliated and executed. Addicts sometimes turned to missionaries for treatment for their addiction, though many associated these foreigners with the drug trade. The program was counted as

17266-565: The drugs bestowed them with visionary glimpses of future happiness. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire supplied the West with opium long before China and India. Extensive textual and pictorial sources also show that poppy cultivation and opium consumption were widespread in Safavid Iran and Mughal India. In England, opium fulfilled a "critical" role, as it did other societies, in addressing multifactorial pain , cough , dysentery , diarrhea , as argued by Virginia Berridge . A medical panacea of

17444-460: The earliest finds, opium has appeared to have ritual significance, and anthropologists have speculated ancient priests may have used the drug as a proof of healing power. In Egypt, the use of opium was generally restricted to priests, magicians, and warriors, its invention is credited to Thoth, and it was said to have been given by Isis to Ra as treatment for a headache. A figure of the Minoan "goddess of

17622-573: The effects of large scale opium prohibition in the 1880s. Opium prohibition in China began in 1729, yet was followed by nearly two centuries of increasing opium use. A massive destruction of opium by an emissary of the Chinese Daoguang Emperor in an attempt to stop opium smuggling by the British led to the First Opium War (1839–1842), in which Britain defeated China. After 1860, opium use continued to increase with widespread domestic production in China. By 1905, an estimated 25 percent of

17800-559: The effects wore off because they would get used to being high. The standard medical use of opium persisted well into the 19th century. US president William Henry Harrison was treated with opium in 1841, and in the American Civil War , the Union Army used 175,000 lb (80,000 kg) of opium tincture and powder and about 500,000 opium pills. During this time of popularity, users called opium "God's Own Medicine". One reason for

17978-440: The elite and remained a great luxury into the early 19th century. However, by 1861, Wang Tao wrote that opium was used even by rich peasants, and even a small village without a rice store would have a shop where opium was sold. Recreational use of opium was part of a civilized and mannered ritual, akin to an East Asian tea ceremony , prior to the extensive prohibitions that came later. In places of gathering, often tea shops, or

18156-665: The ever-growing number of Chinese people becoming addicted to opium, the Qing Daoguang Emperor took strong action to halt the smuggling of opium, including the seizure of cargo. In 1838, the Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 chests of opium (approximately 2,660,000 pounds) in Guangzhou in a river. Given that a chest of opium was worth nearly US$ 1,000 in 1800, this was a substantial economic loss. The British queen Victoria , not willing to replace

18334-739: The fault of metaphysics not in its cognitive ambitions or the meaninglessness of its statements, but in its practical irrelevance and lack of usefulness. Martin Heidegger criticized traditional metaphysics, saying that it fails to distinguish between individual entities and being as their ontological ground. His attempt to reveal the underlying assumptions and limitations in the history of metaphysics to "overcome metaphysics" influenced Jacques Derrida 's method of deconstruction . Derrida employed this approach to criticize metaphysical texts for relying on opposing terms, like presence and absence, which he thought were inherently unstable and contradictory. There

18512-447: The features that all entities share and how entities can be divided into different categories . Categories are the most general kinds, such as substance, property, relation , and fact . Ontologists research which categories there are, how they depend on one another, and how they form a system of categories that provides a comprehensive classification of all entities. Special metaphysics considers being from more narrow perspectives and

18690-468: The fundamental structure of mind-independent reality. The concepts of possibility and necessity convey what can or must be the case, expressed in modal statements like "it is possible to find a cure for cancer" and "it is necessary that two plus two equals four". Modal metaphysics studies metaphysical problems surrounding possibility and necessity, for instance, why some modal statements are true while others are false. Some metaphysicians hold that modality

18868-534: The harm the drug did. Faced with the problem that many Chinese associated Christianity with opium, partly due to the arrival of early Protestant missionaries on opium clippers, at the 1890 Shanghai Missionary Conference, they agreed to establish the Permanent Committee for the Promotion of Anti-Opium Societies in an attempt to overcome this problem and to arouse public opinion against the opium trade. The members of

19046-497: The heels of tobacco smoking and may have been encouraged by a brief ban on the smoking of tobacco by the Ming emperor. The prohibition ended in 1644 with the coming of the Qing dynasty , which encouraged smokers to mix in increasing amounts of opium. In 1705, Wang Shizhen wrote, "nowadays, from nobility and gentlemen down to slaves and women, all are addicted to tobacco." Tobacco in that time

19224-773: The home director of the China Inland Mission , Benjamin Broomhall , was an active opponent of the opium trade, writing two books to promote the banning of opium smoking: The Truth about Opium Smoking and The Chinese Opium Smoker . In 1888, Broomhall formed and became secretary of the Christian Union for the Severance of the British Empire with the Opium Traffic and editor of its periodical, National Righteousness . He lobbied

19402-404: The human mind, created to organize and make sense of reality. Spacetime absolutism or substantivalism understands spacetime as a distinct object, with some metaphysicians conceptualizing it as a container that holds all other entities within it. Spacetime relationism sees spacetime not as an object but as a network of relations between objects, such as the spatial relation of being next to and

19580-426: The illegal drug trade, the morphine is extracted from the opium latex, reducing the bulk weight by 88%. It is then converted to heroin which is almost twice as potent, and increases the value by a similar factor. The reduced weight and bulk make it easier to smuggle. The Mediterranean region contains the earliest archeological evidence of human use; the oldest known seeds date back to more than 5000   BCE in

19758-522: The immigrant population and the social use of opium fell into decline. Yet despite lurid literary accounts to the contrary, 19th-century London was not a hotbed of opium smoking. The total lack of photographic evidence of opium smoking in Britain, as opposed to the relative abundance of historical photos depicting opium smoking in North America and France, indicates the infamous Limehouse opium-smoking scene

19936-420: The increase in opiate consumption in the United States during the 19th century was the prescribing and dispensing of legal opiates by physicians and pharmacists to women with "female complaints" (mostly to relieve menstrual pain and hysteria ). Because opiates were viewed as more humane than punishment or restraint, they were often used to treat the mentally ill. Between 150,000 and 200,000 opiate addicts lived in

20114-447: The indiscernibility of identicals is widely accepted and holds that numerically identical entities exactly resemble one another. The converse principle, known as the identity of indiscernibles or Leibniz's Law, is more controversial and states that two entities are numerically identical if they exactly resemble one another. Another distinction is between synchronic and diachronic identity. Synchronic identity relates an entity to itself at

20292-415: The individual sciences by studying the most general and abstract aspects of reality. The individual sciences, by contrast, examine more specific and concrete features and restrict themselves to certain classes of entities, such as the focus on physical things in physics , living entities in biology , and cultures in anthropology . It is disputed to what extent this contrast is a strict dichotomy rather than

20470-584: The latex is to scratch ("score") the immature seed pods (fruits) by hand; the latex leaks out and dries to a sticky yellowish residue that is later scraped off and dehydrated. The English word for opium is borrowed from Latin , which in turn comes from Ancient Greek : ὄπιον ( ópion ), a diminutive of ὀπός ( opós , "juice of a plant"). The word meconium (derived from the Greek for "opium-like", but now used to refer to newborn stools ) historically referred to related, weaker preparations made from other parts of

20648-453: The male population were regular consumers of the drug. Recreational use of opium elsewhere in the world remained rare into late in the 19th century, as indicated by ambivalent reports of opium usage. In 1906, 41,000 tons were produced, but because 39,000 tons of that year's opium were consumed in China, overall usage in the rest of the world was much lower. These figures from 1906 have been criticized as overestimates. Smoking of opium came on

20826-469: The meaning of a statement is given by the procedure used to verify it, usually through the observations that would confirm it. Based on this controversial assumption, they argue that metaphysical statements are meaningless since they make no testable predictions about experience. A slightly weaker position allows metaphysical statements to have meaning while holding that metaphysical disagreements are merely verbal disputes about different ways to describe

21004-501: The method of eidetic variation is used to investigate essential structures underlying phenomena . This method involves imagining an object and varying its features to determine which ones are essential and cannot be changed. The transcendental method is a further approach and examines the metaphysical structure of reality by observing what entities there are and studying the conditions of possibility without which these entities could not exist. Some approaches give less importance to

21182-734: The mind used to order experience by classifying entities. Natural and social kinds are often understood as special types of universals. Entities belonging to the same natural kind share certain fundamental features characteristic of the structure of the natural world. In this regard, natural kinds are not an artificially constructed classification but are discovered, usually by the natural sciences, and include kinds like electrons , H 2 O , and tigers. Scientific realists and anti-realists disagree about whether natural kinds exist. Social kinds, like money and baseball , are studied by social metaphysics and characterized as useful social constructions that, while not purely fictional, do not reflect

21360-465: The mixture. Eventually, laudanum became readily available and extensively used by the 18th century in Europe, especially England. Compared to other chemicals available to 18th century regular physicians, opium was a benign alternative to arsenic, mercury, or emetics, and it was remarkably successful in alleviating a wide range of ailments. Due to the constipation often produced by the consumption of opium, it

21538-514: The narcotics", wearing a crown of three opium poppies, c.  1300   BCE, was recovered from the Sanctuary of Gazi, Crete, together with a simple smoking apparatus. The Greek gods Hypnos (Sleep), Nyx (Night), and Thanatos (Death) were depicted wreathed in poppies or holding them. Poppies also frequently adorned statues of Apollo , Asclepius , Pluto , Demeter , Aphrodite , Kybele and Isis , symbolizing nocturnal oblivion. As

21716-649: The narrator has a simultaneous desire to forget her, perhaps causing him to be unable to love Rowena. This desire to forget is exemplified in his inability to recall Ligeia's last name. The story tells us however that the narrator never knew her last name at all. Ligeia, the narrator tells us, is extremely intelligent, "such as I have never known in a woman". Most importantly, she served as the narrator's teacher in " metaphysical investigation", passing on "wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!" So, her knowledge in mysticism, combined with an intense desire for life may have led to her revival. The opening epigraph , which

21894-889: The natural sciences rely on concepts such as law of nature , causation, necessity, and spacetime to formulate their theories and predict or explain the outcomes of experiments. While scientists primarily focus on applying these concepts to specific situations, metaphysics examines their general nature and how they depend on each other. For instance, physicists formulate laws of nature, like laws of gravitation and thermodynamics , to describe how physical systems behave under various conditions. Metaphysicians, by contrast, examine what all laws of nature have in common, asking whether they merely describe contingent regularities or express necessary relations. New scientific discoveries have also influenced existing metaphysical theories and inspired new ones. Einstein's theory of relativity , for instance, prompted various metaphysicians to conceive space and time as

22072-401: The object is present, not the object as a whole. Change means that an earlier part is qualitatively different from a later part. For example, when a banana ripens, there is an unripe part followed by a ripe part. Causality is the relation between cause and effect whereby one entity produces or affects another entity. For instance, if a person bumps a glass and spills its contents then the bump

22250-471: The objective features of reality beyond sense experience, from critical metaphysics, which outlines the aspects and principles underlying all human thought and experience. Philosopher P. F. Strawson further explored the role of conceptual schemes, contrasting descriptive metaphysics, which articulates conceptual schemes commonly used to understand the world, with revisionary metaphysics, which aims to produce better conceptual schemes. Metaphysics differs from

22428-582: The ontological foundations of moral claims and religious doctrines. Beyond philosophy, its applications include the use of ontologies in artificial intelligence , economics , and sociology to classify entities. In psychiatry and medicine , it examines the metaphysical status of diseases . Meta-metaphysics is the metatheory of metaphysics and investigates the nature and methods of metaphysics. It examines how metaphysics differs from other philosophical and scientific disciplines and assesses its relevance to them. Even though discussions of these topics have

22606-622: The opium poppy or different species of poppies. The production methods have not significantly changed since ancient times. Through selective breeding of the Papaver somniferum plant, the content of the phenanthrene alkaloids morphine, codeine, and to a lesser extent thebaine has been greatly increased. In modern times, much of the thebaine, which often serves as the raw material for the synthesis for oxycodone , hydrocodone , hydromorphone , and other semisynthetic opiates, originates from extracting Papaver orientale or Papaver bracteatum . For

22784-465: The opium trade during the Japanese occupation of China. Mao Zedong government is generally credited with eradicating both consumption and production of opium during the 1950s using unrestrained repression and social reform. Ten million addicts were forced into compulsory treatment, dealers were executed, and opium-producing regions were planted with new crops. Remaining opium production shifted south of

22962-488: The paradise of opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had." De Quincey writes about the great English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), whose " Kubla Khan " is also widely considered to be a poem of the opium experience. Coleridge began using opium in 1791 after developing jaundice and rheumatic fever , and became a full addict after a severe attack of the disease in 1801, requiring 80–100 drops of laudanum daily. The earliest clear description of

23140-460: The past. From the perspective of the B-series theory, time is static, and events are ordered by the temporal relations earlier-than and later-than without any essential difference between past, present, and future. Eternalism holds that past, present, and future are equally real, whereas presentism asserts that only entities in the present exist. Material objects persist through time and change in

23318-643: The period of military losses and Unequal Treaties as the "Century of National Humiliation", later defined to end with the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In the northern provinces of Ningxia and Suiyuan in China, Chinese Muslim General Ma Fuxiang both prohibited and engaged in the opium trade. It was hoped that Ma Fuxiang would have improved the situation, since Chinese Muslims were well known for opposition to smoking opium. Ma Fuxiang officially prohibited opium and made it illegal in Ningxia, but

23496-576: The placement of large numbers of poppy seed capsules at a burial site (the Cueva de los Murciélagos , or "Bat Cave", in Spain), which has been carbon-14 dated to 4200   BCE. Numerous finds of P. somniferum or P. setigerum from Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements have also been reported. The first known cultivation of opium poppies was in Mesopotamia , approximately 3400   BCE, by Sumerians , who called

23674-506: The plant hul gil , the "joy plant". Tablets found at Nippur , a Sumerian spiritual center south of Baghdad , described the collection of poppy juice in the morning and its use in production of opium. Cultivation continued in the Middle East by the Assyrians , who also collected poppy juice in the morning after scoring the pods with an iron scoop; they called the juice aratpa-pal , possibly

23852-484: The port by the 1690s. Due to the growing British demand for Chinese tea and the Chinese Emperor's lack of interest in British commodities other than silver, British traders resorted to trade in opium as a high-value commodity for which China was not self-sufficient. The English traders had been purchasing small amounts of opium from India for trade since Ralph Fitch first visited in the mid-16th century. Trade in opium

24030-480: The possible consequences of these situations. For example, to explore the relation between matter and consciousness, some theorists compare humans to philosophical zombies —hypothetical creatures identical to humans but without conscious experience . A related method relies on commonly accepted beliefs instead of intuitions to formulate arguments and theories. The common-sense approach is often used to criticize metaphysical theories that deviate significantly from how

24208-664: The power of the Roman Empire declined, the lands to the south and east of the Mediterranean Sea became incorporated into the Islamic Empires . Some Muslims believe hadiths , such as in Sahih Bukhari , prohibit every intoxicating substance, though the use of intoxicants in medicine has been widely permitted by scholars. Dioscorides' five-volume De Materia Medica , the precursor of pharmacopoeias , remained in use (which

24386-579: The presence of whites. Because of the low social status of immigrant workers, contemporary writers and media had little trouble portraying opium dens as seats of vice, white slavery , gambling, knife- and revolver-fights, and a source for drugs causing deadly overdoses, with the potential to addict and corrupt the white population. By 1919, anti-Chinese riots attacked Limehouse , the Chinatown of London . Chinese men were deported for playing keno and sentenced to hard labor for opium possession. Due to this, both

24564-534: The primary source of illicit opium in East and Southeast Asia. Many local powerholders facilitated the trade during this period to finance conflicts over territory and political campaigns. In some areas food crops were eradicated to make way for opium, contributing to famines in Guizhou and Shaanxi Provinces between 1921 and 1923, and food deficits in other provinces. Beginning in 1915, Chinese nationalist groups came to describe

24742-508: The process, like a tree that grows or loses leaves. The main ways of conceptualizing persistence through time are endurantism and perdurantism . According to endurantism, material objects are three-dimensional entities that are wholly present at each moment. As they change, they gain or lose properties but otherwise remain the same. Perdurantists see material objects as four-dimensional entities that extend through time and are made up of different temporal parts . At each moment, only one part of

24920-464: The realm beyond sensory experience. A related argument favoring the unreliability of metaphysical theorizing points to the deep and lasting disagreements about metaphysical issues, suggesting a lack of overall progress. Another criticism holds that the problem lies not with human cognitive abilities but with metaphysical statements themselves, which some claim are neither true nor false but meaningless . According to logical positivists , for instance,

25098-448: The realm of physics and its focus on empirical observation. Metaphysics may have received its name by a historical accident when Aristotle's book on this subject was published. Aristotle did not use the term metaphysics but his editor (likely Andronicus of Rhodes ) may have coined it for its title to indicate that this book should be studied after Aristotle's book published on physics : literally ' after physics ' . The term entered

25276-433: The relation between free will and causal determinism —the view that everything in the universe, including human behavior, is determined by preceding events and laws of nature. It is controversial whether causal determinism is true, and, if so, whether this would imply that there is no free will. According to incompatibilism , free will cannot exist in a deterministic world since there is no true choice or control if everything

25454-402: The renowned "father of English medicine" or "English Hippocrates", to whom is attributed the quote, "Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium." Use of opium as a cure-all was reflected in the formulation of mithridatium described in the 1728 Chambers Cyclopedia , which included true opium in

25632-420: The revivals become progressively stronger, but the relapses more final. As dawn breaks, and the narrator is sitting emotionally exhausted from the night's struggle, the shrouded body revives once more, stands and walks into the middle of the room. When he touches the figure, its head bandages fall away to reveal masses of raven hair and dark eyes: Rowena has transformed into Ligeia. "Ligeia" was first published in

25810-456: The root of Papaver . Opium production continued under the Babylonians and Egyptians . Opium was used with poison hemlock to put people quickly and painlessly to death. It was also used in medicine. Spongia somnifera , sponges soaked in opium, were used during surgery. The Egyptians cultivated opium thebaicum in famous poppy fields around 1300   BCE. Opium was traded from Egypt by

25988-573: The sale of opium, except for a small amount for medicinal purposes. The ban punished sellers and opium den keepers, but not users of the drug. Opium was banned completely in 1799, and this prohibition continued until 1860. During the Qing dynasty, China opened itself to foreign trade under the Canton System through the port of Guangzhou (Canton), with traders from the East India Company visiting

26166-431: The same time, whereas diachronic identity is about the same entity at different times, as in statements like "the table I bought last year is the same as the table in my dining room now". Personal identity is a related topic in metaphysics that uses the term identity in a slightly different sense and concerns questions like what personhood is or what makes someone a person. Various contemporary metaphysicians rely on

26344-559: The same time. For example, the particulars Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi instantiate the universal humanity , similar to how a strawberry and a ruby instantiate the universal red . A topic discussed since ancient philosophy, the problem of universals consists in the challenge of characterizing the ontological status of universals. Realists argue that universals are real, mind-independent entities that exist in addition to particulars. According to Platonic realists , universals exist independently of particulars, which implies that

26522-418: The science of the first causes and as the study of being qua being, that is, the topic of what all beings have in common and to what fundamental categories they belong. In the modern period, the scope of metaphysics expanded to include topics such as the distinction between mind and body and free will . Some philosophers follow Aristotle in describing metaphysics as "first philosophy", suggesting that it

26700-483: The seed capsules of the opium poppy Papaver somniferum . Approximately 12 percent of opium is made up of the analgesic alkaloid morphine , which is processed chemically to produce heroin and other synthetic opioids for medicinal use and for the illegal drug trade . The latex also contains the closely related opiates codeine and thebaine , and non-analgesic alkaloids such as papaverine and noscapine . The traditional, labor-intensive method of obtaining

26878-517: The sentence "some electrons are bonded to protons" is true then it can be used to justify that electrons and protons exist. Quine used this insight to argue that one can learn about metaphysics by closely analyzing scientific claims to understand what kind of metaphysical picture of the world they presuppose. In addition to methods of conducting metaphysical inquiry, there are various methodological principles used to decide between competing theories by comparing their theoretical virtues. Ockham's Razor

27056-415: The silence of the night... as if... I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned... upon the earth". This may be interpreted as evidence that Ligeia's return was nothing more than a drug-induced hallucination . If Ligeia's return from death is literal, however, it seems to stem from her assertion that a person dies only by a weak will. This implies, then, that a strong will can keep someone alive. It

27234-418: The smoking of pure opium was described by Huang Shujing , involving a pipe made from bamboo rimmed with silver, stuffed with palm slices and hair, fed by a clay bowl in which a globule of molten opium was held over the flame of an oil lamp. This elaborate procedure, requiring the maintenance of pots of opium at just the right temperature for a globule to be scooped up with a needle-like skewer for smoking, formed

27412-470: The standard medical textbook that Paracelsus burned in a public bonfire three weeks after being appointed professor at the University of Basel , also described the use of opium, though many Latin translations were of poor quality. Laudanum was originally the 16th-century term for a medicine associated with a particular physician that was widely well-regarded, but became standardized as " tincture of opium",

27590-467: The story into an opera under the French title "Je vous dis que je suis mort." The story was adapted into the 2008 independent feature originally known by the title Edgar Allan Poe's Ligeia but later renamed to The Tomb . The film starred Wes Bentley , Michael Madsen , and Eric Roberts . Opium Opium (or poppy tears , scientific name: Lachryma papaveris ) is dried latex obtained from

27768-556: The story, " The Conqueror Worm ", also leads to some questioning of Ligeia's alleged resurrection. The poem essentially shows an admission of her own inevitable mortality . The inclusion of the bitter poem may have been meant to be ironic or a parody of the convention at the time, both in literature and in life. In the mid-19th century it was common to emphasize the sacredness of death and the beauty of dying (consider Charles Dickens 's Little Johnny character in Our Mutual Friend or

27946-507: The temporal relation of coming before . In the metaphysics of time, an important contrast is between the A-series and the B-series . According to the A-series theory, the flow of time is real, meaning that events are categorized into the past, present, and future. The present continually moves forward in time and events that are in the present now will eventually change their status and lie in

28124-408: The underlying faculties responsible for these phenomena. The mind–body problem is the challenge of clarifying the relation between physical and mental phenomena. According to Cartesian dualism , minds and bodies are distinct substances. They causally interact with each other in various ways but can, at least in principle, exist on their own. This view is rejected by monists , who argue that reality

28302-475: The universal red would continue to exist even if there were no red things. A more moderate form of realism , inspired by Aristotle, states that universals depend on particulars, meaning that they are only real if they are instantiated. Nominalists reject the idea that universals exist in either form. For them, the world is composed exclusively of particulars. Conceptualists offer an intermediate position, stating that universals exist, but only as concepts in

28480-543: The use of opium as a recreational drug in China came from Xu Boling, who wrote in 1483 that opium was "mainly used to aid masculinity, strengthen sperm and regain vigor", and that it "enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies". He also described an expedition sent by the Ming dynasty Chenghua Emperor in 1483 to procure opium for a price "equal to that of gold" in Hainan , Fujian , Zhejiang , Sichuan and Shaanxi , where it

28658-415: The world. According to this view, the disagreement in the metaphysics of composition about whether there are tables or only particles arranged table-wise is a trivial debate about linguistic preferences without any substantive consequences for the nature of reality. The position that metaphysical disputes have no meaning or no significant point is called metaphysical or ontological deflationism . This view

28836-657: The writings of Dioscorides , Galen , and Avicenna . Widespread medical use of unprocessed opium continued through the American Civil War before giving way to morphine and its successors, which could be injected at a precisely controlled dosage. A little of it, taken as much as a grain of ervum is a pain-easer, and a sleep-causer, and a digester...but being drank too much it hurts, making men lethargical, and it kills. Opium has been actively collected since approximately 3400   BCE. At least 17 finds of Papaver somniferum from Neolithic settlements have been reported throughout Switzerland , Germany , and Spain , including

29014-565: Was a student and critic of Galen ; he made use of opium in anesthesia and recommended its use for the treatment of melancholy in Fi ma-la-yahdara al-tabib , "In the Absence of a Physician", a home medical manual directed toward ordinary citizens for self-treatment if a doctor was not available. The renowned Andalusian ophthalmologic surgeon Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi ("Abulcasis", 936–1013 CE) relied on opium and mandrake as surgical anesthetics and wrote

29192-458: Was an extensive and complicated system of BEIC agencies involved in the supervision and management of opium production and distribution in India. Bengal opium was highly prized, commanding twice the price of the domestic Chinese product, which was regarded as inferior in quality. Some competition came from the newly independent United States, which began to compete in Guangzhou, selling Turkish opium in

29370-499: Was edited and improved in the Arabic versions ) from the 1st to 16th centuries, and described opium and the wide range of its uses prevalent in the ancient world. Between 400 and 1200 AD, Arab traders introduced opium to China, and to India by 700 AD. The physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi of Persian origin ("Rhazes", 845–930 CE) maintained a laboratory and school in Baghdad , and

29548-566: Was fiercely against both of the Opium Wars Britain waged in China in the First Opium War initiated in 1840 and the Second Opium War initiated in 1857, denounced British violence against Chinese, and was ardently opposed to the British trade in opium to China. Gladstone lambasted it as " Palmerston's Opium War" and said that he felt "in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China" in May 1840. A famous speech

29726-487: Was found to be a good remedy for nervous disorders. Due to its sedative and tranquilizing properties, it was used to quiet the minds of those with psychosis, help with people who were considered insane, and also to help treat patients with insomnia. However, despite its medicinal values in these cases, it was noted that in cases of psychosis, it could cause anger or depression, and due to the drug's euphoric effects, it could cause depressed patients to become more depressed after

29904-483: Was frequently mixed with other herbs (this continues with clove cigarettes to the modern day), and opium was one component in the mixture. Tobacco mixed with opium was called madak (or madat ) and became popular throughout China and its seafaring trade partners (such as Taiwan , Java , and the Philippines ) in the 17th century. In 1712, Engelbert Kaempfer described addiction to madak : "No commodity throughout

30082-455: Was heavily revised and reprinted throughout Poe's life. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who describes the qualities of Ligeia: a beautiful, passionate and intellectual woman, raven-haired and dark-eyed. He thinks he remembers meeting her "in some large, old decaying city near the Rhine ." He is unable to recall anything about the history of Ligeia, including her family's name, but remembers her beautiful appearance. Her beauty, however,

30260-621: Was instrumental in gathering data from every Western-trained medical doctor in China, which was then published as William Hector Park compiled Opinions of Over 100 Physicians on the Use of Opium in China (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1899). The vast majority of these medical doctors were missionaries; the survey also included doctors who were in private practices, particularly in Shanghai and Hong Kong , as well as Chinese who had been trained in medical schools in Western countries. In England,

30438-464: Was little more than fantasy on the part of British writers of the day, who were intent on scandalizing their readers while drumming up the threat of the "yellow peril". A large scale opium prohibition attempt began in 1729, when the Qing Yongzheng Emperor , disturbed by madak smoking at court and carrying out the government's role of upholding Confucian virtues, officially prohibited

30616-592: Was made by Gladstone in Parliament against the First Opium War . Gladstone criticized it as "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace". His hostility to opium stemmed from the effects of opium brought upon his sister Helen. Due to the First Opium war brought on by Palmerston , there was initial reluctance to join the government of Peel on part of Gladstone before 1841. Following China's defeat in

30794-410: Was one of the most effective treatments for cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea. As a cough suppressant, opium was used to treat bronchitis, tuberculosis, and other respiratory illnesses. Opium was additionally prescribed for rheumatism and insomnia. Medical textbooks even recommended its use by people in good health, to "optimize the internal equilibrium of the human body". During the 18th century, opium

30972-448: Was proposed by Aristotle, who outlined a system of 10 categories . He argued that substances (e.g. man and horse), are the most important category since all other categories like quantity (e.g. four), quality (e.g. white), and place (e.g. in Athens) are said of substances and depend on them. Kant understood categories as fundamental principles underlying human understanding and developed

31150-440: Was published, Poe published only two other prose pieces: "Siope—A Fable" and " The Psyche Zenobia ", both Gothic-styled satires. Supporting evidence for this theory includes the implication that Ligeia is from Germany , a main source of Gothic fiction in the 19th century, and that the description of her hints at much but says nothing, especially in the description of her eyes. The narrator describes their "expression", which he admits

31328-532: Was renewed on September 20, 1906, with an antiopium initiative intended to eliminate the drug problem within 10 years. The program relied on the turning of public sentiment against opium, with mass meetings at which opium paraphernalia were publicly burned, as well as coercive legal action and the granting of police powers to organizations such as the Fujian Anti-Opium Society. Smokers were required to register for licenses for gradually reducing rations of

31506-463: Was standardized, with production of balls of raw opium, 1.1–1.6 kg (2.4–3.5 lb), 30% water content, wrapped in poppy leaves and petals, and shipped in chests of 60–65 kg (132–143 lb) (one picul ). Chests of opium were sold in auctions in Calcutta with the understanding that the independent purchasers would then smuggle it into China. China had a positive balance sheet in trading with

31684-399: Was taxed at US$ 6 to US$ 300 per pound, until the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909 prohibited the importation of opium altogether. In a similar manner, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, passed in fulfillment of the International Opium Convention of 1912, nominally placed a tax on the distribution of opiates, but served as a de facto prohibition of the drugs. Today, opium is regulated by

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