Beschouwingen van de hoogleraar voor kennisleer en metafysica aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam over regelpatronen.

AT Historia Animalium 561b27, during the course of his account of chick embryology, Aristotle notes : . D'Arcy Thompson translated this passage as follows: About the twentieth day, if you open the egg and touch the chick, it moves inside and chirps, and it is already coming to be covered in down when, after the twentieth day is past, the chick begins to break the shell.

The article deals with the concept of the Russian national type of personality by G. P. Fedotov. The author finds the connection between Fedotov’s views and the theory of moderate social constructivism, according to which the formation of nation by elite can be successful only if it comes in accordance with geographical and historical ‘landscapes‘. Russian type of personality is seen as a unity of two polar characters - ‘the muscovite‘ and ‘the intelligent‘. The author points out that Fedotov considers (...) culture as a main factor in the development of history, which makes the very existence of intelligentsia the most important condition of solving many social problems in Russia. (shrink)

Книга посвящена выдающемуся русскому философу Николаю Александровичу Бердяеву. Один из ярчайших представителей русского Серебряного века, философ с мировым именем, он до конца своих дней бился над разгадкой "вечных" вопросов человеческого бытия.

Background: Knowledge about assent or dissent of children to non-therapeutic research is poor.Objectives: To assess sociodemographic characteristics in healthy children and adolescents who were invited to participate in non-therapeutic research, to evaluate their motives for assent or dissent and their understanding of the information given.Methods: A total of 1281 healthy children and adolescents six to sixteen years of age were invited to participate in a non-therapeutic study and a questionnaire.Results: Assenting children were motivated by a desire to help sick children (...) and to gain experience with participating in a research study . Dissenting children made their decision because of worries about having a blood or a urine sample taken or because of worries about a doctor’s examination . Fewer children in the assent group than in the dissent group worried about the doctor’s examination . In the assent and dissent group, 568 and 343 children, respectively, said they were able to understand some or all of the written information , and 650 and 330 , respectively, were able to understand some or all of the verbal information .Conclusions: Sociodemographic characteristics may not influence healthy children’s decision to volunteer for non-therapeutic research. Assenting children have altruistic and educational motives, whereas worries about procedures may cause children to dissent. A great majority of school children and adolescents feel capable of understanding and giving assent or dissent to non-therapeutic research. (shrink)

Historical studies suggest that all ideas, including the philosophical, scientific, and religious, are relative to the culture in which they are formulated. After clarifying the concept of relativism, and exploring the epistemological reasons why knowledge is relative, Kaufman argues that these admissions are not fatal to the achievement of valid knowledge in philosophy and theology.--D. D. O.

Debates about end of life decisions should accept that public opinion on these matters is still fluidChanges in the past half century in the attitudes of the American public regarding euthanasia and suicide in the case of incurable disease have been dramatic, and they attest to the success of a social movement that has been in part a phenomenon “of the times” . But they are also in part a consequence of a highly visible social movement and vigorous deliberate actions (...) intended to shape public opinion, moving it in a direction favourable to concrete changes in law, public policy, and precepts of the profession of medicine.During much of this period, a bewildering plethora of polls has been conducted, related in one way or another to the question of how the public has viewed the issues about end of life decisions. End of life decisions have an important bioethical component, especially as they raise questions of who makes choices and how those choices can be made in an ethical manner. Does the individual have complete control of his or her own fate? Who can act as surrogate? What role, if any, should physicians play, and what are the interests of the state in such decisions? Anyone who wants to write a justification for, or promote advocacy of, any kind of policy regarding these issues ought to be seriously acquainted with trends in public attitudes. While public opinion cannot be the final arbiter of what is ethically correct, knowledge of it will help us to address the issues in a way that will best benefit the public discourse. Unfortunately, hardly any presentation of the polls related to the subject has attempted to reconcile the …. (shrink)

Purpose. The aim of the article is to clarify the content of the concept of culture as an explication of vitality within the philosophy of life and its further modifications in current problems of contemporary. The analysis performed standing from the point, that contrasting of nature and culture is irrelevant, since culture does not contradict natural determinants and patterns, but rather qualitatively alters them. So, are justified the idea of culture as a phenomenon that exist accordingly and in proportion to (...) nature, need to form its potential and content and not contradict the axioms and values of life. Theoretical basis. In the theoretical field of philosophy of life, the local development of the problem of culture as an explication of vitality produces grounds for analytical and prognostic activity concerning meaningful transformations in a separate historical and social horizon. The fundamental categories of culture: spirit, value, symbol, freedom, justice and harmony receive the requested content and meaning. The idea of the constancy and super-naturality of cultural universals is illusory and dangerous. The consequences of such a "non-cosmological" justification of freedom and will, and the assertion of values, that contradict the logic of life, are the global environmental, economic and social crisis of our time. Originality. The originality of the authors’ thought lies in the interpretation of the essence of culture as an explication of vitality, as a logical and natural extension of life. In this formulation of the problem of culture, the possibility of reconciling the natural, social and value determinants of human life is formed. Theorists of the philosophy of life substantiated the primacy and supremacy of the values of life over the values and meanings of culture. The position of authors position consists in the need to understand culture as an environmentally appropriate and dimensional phenomenon, the content and strategies of which are determined by a single ontology. Conclusions. The analysis let authors understand the voluntarily chaotic element of life. Culture in its philosophical analysis took on a clearer anthropomorphic dimension: the immanent logic of being in substantiating the essence and purpose of man and the value of his being localized the universe of transcendence in the concept of "living world", "inhabited space", "human, too human". Accordingly, the range of cultural evaluations has been polarized: from the approving statement of its vital essence, to the disparaging calls for its reform. The chaotic state of voluntarily acts is transformed into cultural codes and stereotypes by rationalization. The modern global nature of crisis phenomena, both in the worldview, in the social, and in the ecological dimension, requires reformatting the understanding of culture as a continuation of nature, and not its antipode. (shrink)

The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

A nonlinear differential equation model is proposed to study the dynamics of HIV/AIDS and its effects on workforce productivity. The disease-free equilibrium point of the model is shown to be locally asymptotically stable when the associated basic reproduction number $$\mathcal{{R}}_{0}$$ is less than unity. The model is also shown to exhibit multiple endemic states for some parameter values when $$\mathcal{{R}}_{0} 1$$. Global asymptotic stability of the disease-free equilibrium is guaranteed only when the fractions of the Susceptible subclass populations are within (...) some bounds. Optimal control analysis of the model revealed that the most cost effective strategy that should be adopted in the fight against HIV/AIDS spread within the workforce is one that seeks to prevent infections and the treatment of infected individuals. (shrink)

Despite a misleading title, a superfluous introduction, and a dubious concluding argument, this book succeeds in demonstrating the unorthodox thesis that a concept of a "history of reason" is "genuine and central" to Kant’s system. The first part demonstrates a decisive and highly problematic shift in Kant’s practical philosophy, where a synthesis of morality and nature, the idea of the highest good, is made the object of duty. In this way the highest good, initially a "rational version of the notion (...) of the next world," becomes Kant’s regulative idea of history, "the kingdom of God on earth," comprising both "inner disposition and external institution". The ability to realize the highest good is a logical condition of the concept of duty and a "psychological condition of the ‘inner act’ of intention". The latter condition, Yovel suggests, explains why Kant identifies the ground of this ability with God. The sole objective significance of Kant’s idea of God, however, is said to reside in duty’s logical condition, viz., "the assertion that the given world is the highest good in potentia, and that human praxis can make it so actually". Though much more needs to be said, Yovel thus makes a strong case that Kant’s concept of God is "only a subjective decor" and "strictly humanistic". (shrink)

A total of 1918 loci, detected by the hybridization of 938 expressed sequence tag unigenes from 26 Triticeae cDNA libraries, were mapped to wheat homoeologous group 4 chromosomes using a set of deletion, ditelosomic, and nulli-tetrasomic lines. The 1918 EST loci were not distributed uniformly among the three group 4 chromosomes; 41, 28, and 31% mapped to chromosomes 4A, 4B, and 4D, respectively. This pattern is in contrast to the cumulative results of EST mapping in all homoeologous groups, as reported (...) elsewhere, that found the highest proportion of loci mapped to the B genome. Sixty-five percent of these 1918 loci mapped to the long arms of homoeologous group 4 chromosomes, while 35% mapped to the short arms. The distal regions of chromosome arms showed higher numbers of loci than the proximal regions, with the exception of 4DL. This study confirmed the complex structure of chromosome 4A that contains two reciprocal translocations and two inversions, previously identified. An additional inversion in the centromeric region of 4A was revealed. A consensus map for homoeologous group 4 was developed from 119 ESTs unique to group 4. Forty-nine percent of these ESTs were found to be homoologous to sequences on rice chromosome 3, 12% had matches with sequences on other rice chromosomes, and 39% had no matches with rice sequences at all. Limited homology was found between wheat ESTs on homoeologous group 4 and the Arabidopsis genome. Forty-two percent of the homoeologous group 4 ESTs could be classified into functional categories on the basis of blastX searches against all protein databases. (shrink)

The focus of this study was to analyze the content, distribution, and comparative genome relationships of 996 chromosome bin-mapped expressed sequence tags accounting for 2266 restriction fragments on the homoeologous group 3 chromosomes of hexaploid wheat. Of these loci, 634, 884, and 748 were mapped on chromosomes 3A, 3B, and 3D, respectively. The individual chromosome bin maps revealed bins with a high density of mapped ESTs in the distal region and bins of low density in the proximal region of the (...) chromosome arms, with the exception of 3DS and 3DL. These distributions were more localized on the higher-resolution group 3 consensus map with intermediate regions of high-mapped-EST density on both chromosome arms. Gene ontology classification of mapped ESTs was not significantly different for homoeologous group 3 chromosomes compared to the other groups. A combined analysis of the individual bin maps using 537 of the mapped ESTs revealed rearrangements between the group 3 chromosomes. Approximately 232 of the consensus mapped ESTs matched sequences on rice chromosome 1 and revealed large- and small-scale differences in gene order. Of the group 3 mapped EST unigenes ∼21 and 32% matched the Arabidopsis coding regions and proteins, respectively, but no chromosome-level gene order conservation was detected. (shrink)

A total of 944 expressed sequence tags generated 2212 EST loci mapped to homoeologous group 1 chromosomes in hexaploid wheat. EST deletion maps and the consensus map of group 1 chromosomes were constructed to show EST distribution. EST loci were unevenly distributed among chromosomes 1A, 1B, and ID with 660, 826, and 726, respectively. The number of EST loci was greater on the long arms than on the short arms for all three chromosomes. The distribution of ESTs along chromosome arms (...) was nonrandom with EST clusters occurring in the distal regions of short arms and middle regions of long arms. Duplications of group 1 ESTs in other homoeologous groups occurred at a rate of 35.5%. Seventy-five percent of wheat chromosome 1 ESTs had significant matches with rice sequences, where large regions of conservation occurred between wheat consensus chromosome 1 and rice chromosome 5 and between the proximal portion of the long arm of wheat consensus chromosome 1 and rice chromosome 10. Only 9.5% of group 1 ESTs showed significant matches to Arabidopsis genome sequences. The results presented are useful for gene mapping and evolutionary and comparative genomics of grasses. (shrink)