It is good that man should accept at face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh and through the fogs of
sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion.
The mimosa variously became a bawdy metaphor for male and female genitalia (James Perry's "Mimosa: or, The Sensitive Plant" of 1779, a poem that contained explicit botanical phallic imagery and was dedicated to botanist Joseph Banks); a symbol of humanized sensitivity (William Cowper's "The Poet, The Oyster, and Sensitive Plant" of 1782); and a means to explore
sentiency in nature and human feeling (Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Sensitive Plant" of 1820).
(2) Cox's mechanical flowers, associating nature, motion, and time, dramatize one side of contemporary debates about whether the movements of biological plants more closely analogized such passive, clockwork automatons, or instead might illustrate a form of
sentiency, inviting human analogy.
Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture is part of a series on Animal Ethics aimed at addressing new scientific and philosophical inquiries into 'animal
sentiency, cognition, and awareness' (p.
Like many (most?) of you, I was a certified gun crank from my first taste of
sentiency. My fingers naturally formed a make-believe pistol as I did battle with my classmates at recess (remember when we could do that?).
And we now know that
sentiency, the ability to experience pleasure and pain, requires not only the formation of nerve cells but a functioning central nervous system.
Five years before Lovelock came up with his theory, L'Engle sounds quite Gaian when she asserts the universe as alive and says, "I do have the feeling that the earth has its own
sentiency, that it is a thinking creature and that paradoxically some of our 'natural' cataclysms are when it gets too irritated at what we are doing.