Baumgarten on Sensible Perfection

One of the most important concepts Baumgarten introduces in his Reflections on Poetry is the concept of sensible perfection. It is surprising that Baumgarten does not elaborate upon this concept in his Metaphysics, since it plays such an important role in the new science of aesthetics that he proposes at the end of the Reflections on Poetry and then further develops in the Aesthetics. This article considers the significance of the absence of sensible perfection from the Metaphysics and its implications for Baumgarten’s aesthetics, before turning to the use Meier and Kant make of Baumgarten’s concept. In the end, this article shows that Baumgarten did not abandon his conception of sensible perfection in the Metaphysics, though its influence declined significantly after Kant rejected the idea that sensibility and the understanding could be distinguished by the perfections of their cognition.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Beyond the Analytic of Finitude: Kant, Heidegger, Foucault

The editors of the French edition of Michel Foucault's Introduction to Kant's Anthropology claim that Foucault started rereading Kant through Nietzsche in 1952 and then began rereading Kant and Nietzsche through Heidegger in 1953. This claim has not received much attention in the scholarly literature, but its significance should not be underestimated. In this article, I assess the likelihood that the editor’s claim is true and show how Foucault’s introduction to Kant’s Anthropology and his comments about Kant in The Order of Things echo the concerns about finitude and subjectivity in Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I then argue that Foucault's later preoccupation with Kant's essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? should be regarded as an attempt to develop an alternative to the Heideggerian interpretation of Kant, and the preoccupation with finitude, that had played such an important role in Foucault’s earlier works

Формирование эмоциональной культуры как компонента инновационной культуры студентов

Homozygosity has long been associated with rare, often devastating, Mendelian disorders1 and Darwin was one of the first to recognise that inbreeding reduces evolutionary fitness2. However, the effect of the more distant parental relatedness common in modern human populations is less well understood. Genomic data now allow us to investigate the effects of homozygosity on traits of public health importance by observing contiguous homozygous segments (runs of homozygosity, ROH), which are inferred to be homozygous along their complete length. Given the low levels of genome-wide homozygosity prevalent in most human populations, information is required on very large numbers of people to provide sufficient power3,4. Here we use ROH to study 16 health-related quantitative traits in 354,224 individuals from 102 cohorts and find statistically significant associations between summed runs of homozygosity (SROH) and four complex traits: height, forced expiratory lung volume in 1 second (FEV1), general cognitive ability (g) and educational attainment (nominal p<1 × 10−300, 2.1 × 10−6, 2.5 × 10−10, 1.8 × 10−10). In each case increased homozygosity was associated with decreased trait value, equivalent to the offspring of first cousins being 1.2 cm shorter and having 10 months less education. Similar effect sizes were found across four continental groups and populations with different degrees of genome-wide homozygosity, providing convincing evidence for the first time that homozygosity, rather than confounding, directly contributes to phenotypic variance. Contrary to earlier reports in substantially smaller samples5,6, no evidence was seen of an influence of genome-wide homozygosity on blood pressure and low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, or ten other cardio-metabolic traits. Since directional dominance is predicted for traits under directional evolutionary selection7, this study provides evidence that increased stature and cognitive function have been positively selected in human evolution, whereas many important risk factors for late-onset complex diseases may not have been

The Expressibility of Functions on the Boolean Domain, with Applications to Counting CSPs

An important tool in the study of the complexity of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) is the notion of a relational clone, which is the set of all relations expressible using primitive positive formulas over a particular set of base relations. Post's lattice gives a complete classification of all Boolean relational clones, and this has been used to classify the computational difficulty of CSPs. Motivated by a desire to understand the computational complexity of (weighted) counting CSPs, we develop an analogous notion of functional clones and study the landscape of these clones. One of these clones is the collection of log-supermodular (lsm) functions, which turns out to play a significant role in classifying counting CSPs. In the conservative case (where all nonnegative unary functions are available), we show that there are no functional clones lying strictly between the clone of lsm functions and the total clone (containing all functions). Thus, any counting CSP that contains a single nontrivial non-lsm function is computationally as hard to approximate as any problem in #P. Furthermore, we show that any nontrivial functional clone (in a sense that will be made precise) contains the binary function “implies”. As a consequence, in the conservative case, all nontrivial counting CSPs are as hard to approximate as #BIS, the problem of counting independent sets in a bipartite graph. Given the complexity-theoretic results, it is natural to ask whether the “implies” clone is equivalent to the clone of lsm functions. We use the Möbius transform and the Fourier transform to show that these clones coincide precisely up to arity 3. It is an intriguing open question whether the lsm clone is finitely generated. Finally, we investigate functional clones in which only restricted classes of unary functions are available

Patients’ willingness to participate in a breast cancer biobank at screening mammogram

PURPOSE: To characterize patients’ willingness to donate a biospecimen for future research as part of a breast cancer-related biobank involving a general screening population. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We performed a prospective cross-sectional study of 4,217 women aged 21 to 89 years presenting to our facilities for screening mammogram between December 2010 and October 2011. This HIPAA-compliant study was approved by our institutional review board. We collected data on patients’ interest in and actual donation of a biospecimen, motivators and barriers to donating, demographic information, and personal breast cancer risk factors. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed to identify patient-level characteristics associated with an increased likelihood to donate. RESULTS: Mean patient age was 57.8 years (SD 11.1 years). While 66.0% (2785/4217) of patients were willing to donate blood or saliva during their visit, only 56.4% (2378/4217) actually donated. Women with a college education (OR=1.27, p=0.003), older age (OR=1.02, p<0.001), previous breast biopsy (OR=1.23, p=0.012), family history of breast cancer (OR=1.23, p=0.004), or a comorbidity (OR=1.22, p=0.014) were more likely to donate. Asian-American women were significantly less likely to donate (OR=0.74, p=0.005). The major reason for donating was to help all future patients (42.3%) and the major reason for declining donation was privacy concerns (22.3%). CONCLUSION: A large proportion of women participating in a breast cancer screening registry are willing to donate blood or saliva to a biobank. Among minority participants, Asian-American women are less likely to donate and further qualitative research is required to identify novel active recruitment strategies to ensure their involvement

Conscientious objection and person-centered care

From PubMed via Jisc Publications Router.Stephen Buetow - ORCID 0000-0002-9771-248X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9771-248XItem not available in this repository.Person-centered care offers a promising way to manage clinicians' conscientious objection to providing services they consider morally wrong. Health care centered on persons, rather than patients, recognizes clinicians and patients on the same stratum. The moral interests of clinicians, as persons, thus warrant as much consideration as those of other persons, including patients. Interconnected moral interests of clinicians, patients, and society construct the clinician as a socially embedded and integrated self, transcending the simplistic duality of private conscience versus public role expectations. In this milieu of blurred boundaries, person-centered care offers a constructive way to accommodate conscientious objection by clinicians. The constitutionally social nature of clinicians commits and enables them, through care mechanisms such as self-care, to optimize the quality of health care and protect the welfare of patients. To advance these conditions, it is recommended that the medical profession develop a person-centered culture of care, along with clinician virtues and skills for person-centered communication.39pubpu