Monica Colvin-Adams,1 Nonyelum Harcourt,1 Robert LeDuc,2 Ganesh Raveendran,1 Yassir Sonbol,3 Robert Wilson,1 Daniel Duprez11Cardiovascular Division, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA; 2Division of Biostatistics University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA; 3Cardiovascular Division, St Luke's Hospital System, Sugar Land, TX, USAObjective: Arterial elasticity is a functional biomarker that has predictive value for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in nontransplant populations. There is little information regarding arterial elasticity in heart transplant recipients. This study aimed to characterize small and large artery elasticity in (...) heart transplant recipients in comparison with an asymptomatic population free of overt cardiovascular disease. A second goal was to identify demographic and clinical factors associated with arterial elasticity in this unique population.Methods: Arterial pulse waveform was registered noninvasively at the radial artery in 71 heart transplant recipients between 2008 and 2010. SAEs and LAEs were derived from diastolic pulse contour analysis. Comparisons were made to a healthy cohort of 1,808 participants selected from our prevention clinic database. Multiple regression analyses were performed to evaluate associations between risk factors and SAE and LAE within the heart transplant recipients.Results: LAE and SAE were significantly lower in heart transplant recipients than in the normal cohort. Female sex and history of ischemic cardiomyopathy were significantly associated with reduced LAE and SAE. Older age and the presence of moderate cardiac allograft vasculopathy were also significantly associated with reduced SAE. Transplant duration was associated with increased SAE.Conclusion: Heart transplants are associated with peripheral endothelial dysfunction and arterial stiffness, as demonstrated by a significant reduction in SAE and LAE when compared with a healthy population. Furthermore, cardiac allograft vasculopathy is associated with a significant reduction in SAE, suggesting a potential use in screening heart transplant recipients at risk for developing this complication.Keywords: heart transplant, endothelial function, arterial elasticity, cardiac allograft vasculopathy. (shrink)

Subliminal perception (SP) is today considered a well-supported theory stating that perception can occur without conscious awareness and have a significant impact on later behaviour and thought. In this article, we first present and discuss different approaches to the study of SP. In doing this, we claim that most approaches are based on a dichotomic measure of awareness. Drawing upon recent advances and discussions in the study of introspection and phenomenological psychology, we argue for both the possibility and necessity of (...) using an elaborated measure of subjective states. In the second part of the article, we present findings where these considerations are implemented in an empirical study. The results and implications are discussed in detail, both with reference to SP, and in relation to the more general problem of using elaborate introspective reports as data in relation to studies of cognition. (shrink)

Using the corpus of JSTOR articles, we investigate the role of gender in collaboration patterns across the scholarly landscape by analyzing gender-based homophily--the tendency for researchers to co-author with individuals of the same gender. For a nuanced analysis of gender homophily, we develop methodology necessitated by the fact that the data comprises heterogeneous sub-disciplines and that not all authorships are exchangeable. In particular, we distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and (...) non-gendered authorship norms of a scholarly community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. Using minimal modeling assumptions, we measure and test for behavioral homophily. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily. (shrink)

Background: Although ethics consultation has been introduced to clinical practice for many years, the results of empirical studies to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics consultation are still controversial. The design of randomised controlled trials is considered the best research design to evaluate the effect of a clinical practice on the outcomes of interests. In order to understand the effects of ethics consultation, we conducted this search for studies with the design of randomised controlled trials to evaluate ethics consultation.Objective: To provide (...) an integrated review of studies with the design of randomised controlled trials to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics consultation.Methods: PubMed was used to search for studies using the randomised controlled trial design to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics consultation. The search term used was “ethics consultation”. The selection criterion was limited to “randomised controlled trial”.Results: Four articles that met both search criteria were retrieved. One of these articles reported a study that did not actually use the design of a randomised controlled trial and is excluded from the following discussion.Conclusions: To apply randomised controlled trials to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics consultation is extremely difficult as long as two issues are not resolved: the standardisation of ethics consultation and a placebo for ethics consultation to eliminate the placebo effect. Thus, the results generated by the design of randomised controlled trials are always problematic. Furthermore, as long as the two issues exist, the results generated by the design of quantitative research methods always pose problems. (shrink)

Public policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented computer models and simulations often focus more on articulating the policies to be applied than on realistically rendering the cultural dynamics of the target society. This approach can lead to policy assessments that ignore crucial social contextual factors. For example, by leaving out distinctive moral and normative dimensions of cultural contexts in artificial societies, estimations of downstream policy effectiveness fail to account for dynamics that are fundamental in (...) human life and central to many public policy challenges. In this paper, we supply evidence that incorporating morally salient dimensions of a culture is critically important for producing relevant and accurate evaluations of social policy when using multi-agent artificial intelligence models and simulations. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The authors aim to reveal the influence of philosophical and esoteric principles on the formation and further development of Roberto Assagioli’s concept of psychosynthesis. _The theoretical basis_ of the study is determined by the latest methodological approaches in the study of the relationship between philosophical, psychological, and esoteric approaches in the study of the unconscious and the formation of a harmonious personality. _Originality._ For the first time, a systematic analysis of the anthropological foundations of Roberto Assagioli’s work has been (...) carried out in Ukrainian philosophical literature, the specificity of the connection between esoteric teachings and psychosynthesis has been revealed on the basis of a thorough study of primary sources and biographical evidence of the life and work of the famous Italian thinker. _Conclusions._ Psychosynthesis, which is one of the leading directions of modern psychology, has a rather multicultural philosophical and methodological basis. Its founder Roberto Assagioli, while developing his concept, was influenced by theosophical-esoteric, pragmatic kabbalistic, and Eastern religious concepts and practices. Unlike psychoanalysis, which saw the unconscious as physiological-naturalistic determinants of the human psyche and behavior, psychosynthesis considers the unconscious as a hidden potential for self-development of the individual. Roberto Assagioli went through a long and difficult way to finally form his own concept, which became the basis of the psycho-techniques of disidentification and work with subpersonalities, which help to discover the true transpersonal self, which is the source of human self-improvement. Modern discussions about the relationship between psychosynthesis and various forms of parapsychology once again testify to the synthetic nature of Assagioli’s teaching, which combines various psychotherapeutic practices. This is what gives psychosynthesis a new push for development in the conditions of wars, disasters, loneliness, and related psychological disorders. (shrink)

The question of whether knowledge is definable in terms of belief, which has played an important role in epistemology for the last 50 years, is studied here in the framework of epistemic and doxastic logics. Three notions of definability are considered: explicit definability, implicit definability, and reducibility, where explicit definability is equivalent to the combination of implicit definability and reducibility. It is shown that if knowledge satisfies any set of axioms contained in S5, then it cannot be explicitly defined in (...) terms of belief. S5 knowledge can be implicitly defined by belief, but not reduced to it. On the other hand, S4.4 knowledge and weaker notions of knowledge cannot be implicitly defined by belief, but can be reduced to it by defining knowledge as true belief. It is also shown that S5 knowledge cannot be reduced to belief and justification, provided that there are no axioms that involve both belief and justification. (shrink)

Humans can learn complex functional relationships between variables from small amounts of data. In doing so, they draw on prior expectations about the form of these relationships. In three experiments, we show that people learn to adjust these expectations through experience, learning about the likely forms of the functions they will encounter. Previous work has used Gaussian processes—a statistical framework that extends Bayesian nonparametric approaches to regression—to model human function learning. We build on this work, modeling the process of learning (...) to learn functions as a form of hierarchical Bayesian inference about the Gaussian process hyperparameters. (shrink)

_Purpose_ of the article is to find out the main content and ways of embodying freedom as a value of the volunteer movement in the context of analyzing the social motivation of human behavior in general. _Theoretical basis._ The theoretical basis of the research is the philosophical and anthropological understanding of freedom as a person’s creative overcoming of obstacles to establish his or her eccentric essence. Such a vision is embedded, in particular, in Karl Jaspers’ philosophy of existence, Helmuth Plessner’s (...) philosophy of positioning in the world, and Paul Ricœur’s philosophy of rational choice of life path. _Originality__._ The importance of freedom as a value, as well as other social values, is revealed and specified through the analysis of the values of the volunteer movement. In the desire of people engaged in volunteer work to achieve freedom through other values, the content of freedom as a basis for self-reproduction of the individual, community and society is revealed. _Conclusions._ Representatives of various humanities and social sciences have distinct research interests in analyzing the values inherent in volunteers. As members of a certain society and certain communities in this society, volunteers do not act outside the economy, politics and other spheres of public life, but reveal their freedom through creative and non-standard solutions to economic, political, and other problems. At the same time, research psychologists focus attention on the personal self-realization of a person, theorists and practitioners of social work study volunteers’ desire to gain recognition from peers and other small social groups, and representatives of sociology, political science and other social sciences focus their attention on such socially significant values of volunteering as patriotism, solidarity, etc. The task of social philosophy is to justify the desire to contribute to the public good, which is common to all volunteers. Representatives of philosophical anthropology look for the best social intentions inherent in a person as a member of society in volunteering. Analysis of the values of volunteering as a motivator of human behavior provides knowledge of socially significant values inherent in every member of society to a greater or lesser extent. (shrink)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images (...) of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music. (shrink)

This essay conceptualizes the intersections between contemporary catastrophes and political life by exploring how narratives of catastrophe mediate discursive and objective processes of catastrophization. It argues for the need to counteract catastrophization, a discursive and objective political phenomenon, by not only re-cognizing how catastrophes impinge on political life but by offering a more critical understanding of this intersection. The essay thus calls for the politicization of catastrophe as a response to the “catastrophization of political life.” Apropos of these concerns, it (...) engages with Habermas in order to explore how his political theory and interventions illustrate important aspects of the intersections between narratives of catastrophe and contemporary political life, say, how discursive catastrophization leads to the misrecognition of objective modalities of catastrophe. Overall, this essay offers an account of how to conceptualize catastrophe and catastrophization in order to articulate the broad contours of a political theory of catastrophe. (shrink)

The author argues that to explore what is distinctly Christian about Christian bioethics requires clarity about what is Christian. He distinguishes between the Christian (that which can be identified as authentically Christian), Christianity (the sum of that which is authentically Christian), and ecclesiastical traditions (the historic communities of faith and practice that are predicated upon both Christian and extra-Christian tradition) to critically assess what is to be declared Christian. In addition to exploring the role of New Testament scripture in identifying (...) the Christian, the author emphasizes the need to recognize the extent to which the content of Christianity is Hebraic and Jewish. (shrink)

As previous pandemics, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has direct and indirect effects on mental health and well-being. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether meaning in life mediated the association between coronavirus suffering and satisfaction with life and whether stress-related growth moderated the mediating effect of meaning in life on the association between these variables. Stress-Related Growth Measure (SGM) was also conducted for the purpose of this study. The participants were 402 (66% women) young adults who (...) completed the Suffering Measure During COVID-19, Meaningful Living Measure, Satisfaction With Life Scale, and SGM. The results indicated that the SGM has adequate psychometric properties with unidimensional structure of stress-related growth in the face of adversity. Moderated mediation analysis revealed that coronavirus suffering directly influenced satisfaction with life as well as indirectly by its effect on meaning in life. Additionally, stress-related growth was found as a moderator in the relationship between coronavirus suffering–meaning in life and coronavirus suffering–satisfaction with life. These results suggest that meaning in life mitigates the effect of coronavirus suffering on satisfaction with life, and this mediating effect is moderated by stress-related growth in young adults. While meaning in life helps explain the relationship between coronavirus suffering and satisfaction with life, the stress-related growth functions as a protective factor against the adverse effect of coronavirus experiences. (shrink)

Special issue: Pre ́cis and Commentaries on Veit’s ‘Animal Consciousness’ Abstract: Facing stress and producing stress responses are crucial aspects of an organism’s life and the evolution of both its species and of the other species in its environment, which are co-evolving with it. Philosophers and biologists emphasize the importance of environmental complexity and how organisms deal with it in evolution of cognitive processes. This article adds to these discussions by highlighting the importance of stress physiology in processes connected to (...) plant cognition. While this article supports the thesis that life means cognizing (i.e., sensing the environment, arranging internal processes according to that perception, and affecting the environment with its actions), it also emphasizes that there are various kinds of organisms. In this regard, plant cognition is not animal cognition. However, given both the variety and continuity in evolutionary processes and the similarities even between the distantly related organisms in the tree of life, I argue that it is usually useful to consider and compare physiological and molecular mechanisms in plants and animals as well as the concepts and research processes in animal and plant science. Although the “pathological complexity” thesis that Veit (2023) presents is fruitful in considering the evolution of consciousness and cognition, I argue that, when thinking of biological processes in relation to cognition, stress can be a helpful concept (maybe even as suitable as pathological complexity) in thinking of organisms’ responses to environmental complexity and their adaptation and acclimation processes. (shrink)

'This study is extremely authoritative and up-to-date... This book has much to offer linguists motivated by any one of several primary interests, particularly universals and the connection between language and cognition' -Journal of Linguistics 'Aikhenvald displays the rare gift of being able to inspire interest in new research through the success of her own results, without stifling those future possibilities through undue certitude in having discovered all of the answers already. The best thing about this very excellent book is precisely (...) the author's keen awareness that it is not the last word on the subject' -Journal of Linguistics 'Data presented in a clear, straightforward manner... also cutting edge research presented in the spirit of a work in progress' -Journal of LinguisticsAlmost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition. (shrink)

This study offers an embodied, action-oriented perspective on metaphor. It weaves together 3 theoretical ideas: (a) Lakoff & Johnson's (1980a, 1980b, 1980c; Lakoff, 1993) idea that metaphors are cross-domain conceptual mappings, (b) Lakoff & Johnson's (1999) idea that individuals are coupled to the world through embodied interactions with the environment, on which their sense of what is real is based, and (c) Gibbs's (1999) nascent idea that metaphors can be off-loaded into the cultural world. I argue that metaphors, as cross-domain (...) mappings, can be directly realized in the coupling of the external settings that frame and sustain one's activities and what people, individually and collectively, do to and in the world. A comparison of conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory is made from this perspective. I argue that the blending theory is overly stretched when it is applied to an analysis of metaphorical activity that can be jointly explained by cross-domain mappings and the external structures that constrain and modulate the activity. As for the conceptual metaphor theory, I argue that the theory is overly restrictive if domains are construed exclusively in neural terms. (shrink)

A phenome occurs through the many pathways of the complex net of interaction between the phenome and its environment; therefore researching and understanding how it arises requires investigation into many possible causes that are in constant interaction with each other. The most comprehensive investigations in biology are the ones in which many biologists from different sub-areas—evolutionary biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, physiology, genetics, epigenetics, ecology—have collaborated. Still, biologists do not always need to collaborate or look for the most comprehensive explanations. (...) A more standard investigation in biology occurs within a single subarea, and uses well-defined experiments with very specific conditions. This paper is about causation and related explanation in plant phenome research and its relevance to Aristotle’s Theory of Four Causes. I argue that there are causes which resemble Aristotle’s formal, material, and efficient causes in phenotype explanation and occurrence; but causes which resemble Aristotle’s final causes occur in phenotype explanation only, not in the occurrence. (shrink)

Recent studies revealed how the reference to Zhuangzi played a determining role in the evolution of Heidegger’s thinking. Among the sources is a work written in 1945 under the title _Country Path Conversations_. The last of these conversations presents strong similarities with another between Confucius and Yan Hui, imagined by Zhuangzi at the beginning of the fourth chapter. Analogies between these two conversations are so numerous that it is surprising that it has not been noticed until now. However, the establishment (...) of this rapprochement is crucial. It might show how deep is the echo that Heidegger acknowledged between his work and the Lao-Zhuang perspective. Moreover, it reveals that this resonance is not limited to the themes of the “path” and the “letting be,” but also concerns the essential problem of evil and the way to face it. (shrink)

The human Y chromosome contains very low levels of nucleotide variation. It has been variously hypothesized that this invariance reflects historic reductions in the human male population, a very recent common ancestry, a slow rate of molecular evolution, an inability to evolve adaptively, or frequent selective sweeps acting on genes borne on the Y chromosome. We propose an alternative theory in which human Y chromosome evolution is driven by mutations in the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome, which impair male fertility and (...) ultimately lead to a reduction in the effective population size (Ne) and consequently the variability of the Y chromosome. BioEssays 24:275–279, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.; DOI 10.1002/bies.10062. (shrink)

(2000). ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER'S CONCEPT OF ‘ENLIGHTENMENT’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 521-544. doi: 10.1080/096087800442165.

Causal independence of the simultaneous positions and momenta of two distinguishable particles in nonrelativistic physics and causal independence of events in two relatively spacelike regions of space-time in relativity are analyzed and discussed. This review paper formulates causal independence in a general and operational way and summarizes the inferences drawn from it in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, classical relativistic point mechanics, quantum field theory, and classical field theory. Special attention is given to the open question of the relationship between local independence (...) and commutativity in quantum field theory. (shrink)

This paper presents and discusses a recent Israeli proposal to legislate on the rights of the dying patient. A gap exists between elitist biases of the committee proposing the law, and popular values and sentiments. The proposed law divides the dying patients into two groups: “those who wish to go on living” and “those who wish to die”. The former will have a right to life prolonging extraordinary care. It is not clear who would foot the bill for this care. (...) Also it is hard to see how this munificence could fail to discriminate against all other patients. Both the secular ethicists and the rabbis involved in drawing up the proposal accepted the assumption that it is good for some terminal patients to die. The rabbis objected, however, to direct and active interventions that shorten life. The solution arrived at was to install timers in the ventilators so as to allow them to expire automatically unless the patient wishes for their resetting. (shrink)

Det er eit uttalt mål å gjøre grunnskulelærarutdanninga forskingsbasert. I det dominerande tankemønsteret i grunnskulelærarutdanninga er det konstruert ei motsetning mellom vitskapleg kunnskap og erfaringskunnskap. Vitskapleg kunnskap vert skildra som noko positivt, medan erfaringskunnskap får ei negativ omtale. Dette filosofiske essayet vil framskrive ei re-oppfatning av denne dikotomien. Målet med arbeidet er å redusere dikotomien mellom desse to kunnskapsformene og vise ei forståing som er meir jambyrdig, og som samlande kan bli kalla for lærarens levande kunnskap. Teorien om levande kunnskap (...) tar utgangpunkt i mennesket si heilskapande erkjenningsevne. Mennesket sin kognitive kapasitet inneheld både rasjonelle, etiske, emosjonelle og motoriske erkjenningar. Eit avgjørande aspekt med den levande kunnskapen er lærarens etiske- emosjonelle kunnskap og sensibilitet i tillegg til den logisk rasjonelle evna. (shrink)

There is significant potential for machine learning (ML) models and systems to enhance prognostic, diagnostic, and therapeutic decision-making in the healthcare context. When used in clinical setti...

An algebraic block-diagonalization of the Dirac Hamiltonian in a time-independent external field reveals a charge-index conservation law which forbids the physical phenomena of the Klein paradox type and guarantees a single-particle nature of the Dirac equation in strong external fields. Simultaneously, the method defines simpler quantum-mechanical objects—paulions and antipaulions, whose 2-component wave functions determine the Dirac electron states through exact operator relations. Based on algebraic symmetry, the presented theory leads to a new understanding of the Dirac equation physics, including new (...) insight into the Dirac measurements and a consistent scheme of relativistic quantum mechanics of electron in the paulion representation. Along with analysis of the mathematical anatomy of the Klein paradox falsity, a complete set of paradox-free eigenfunctions for the Klein problem is obtained and investigated via stationary solutions of the Pauli-like equations with respective paulion Hamiltonians. It is shown that the physically correct Dirac states in the Klein zone are characterized by the total particle reflection from the potential step and satisfy the fundamental charge-index conservation law. (shrink)

Discussion of a short text on ethics, originally Greek, translated into Arabic and Hebrew, and adopted by some Christians, Muslims and Jews for guiding their lives.

Mustafa Sabri Efendi, Osmanlı Devleti’nin siyasi kayıplar yaşadığı dönemin sonlarında Şeyhülislamlık yapmış, Cumhuriyet’in ilanı sürecinde yaşamıştır. Batı’daki bilimsel gelişmelerle birlikte İslam düşüncesinde duraklamanın tecrübe edildiği dönemde, geleneksel ilmî mirası ve bu ilimlerin metotlarını savunmuş bir isimdir. Bu hassasiyetle modern bilimsel yöntemleri savunan çoğu İslam düşünürüne eleştiriler yöneltmiştir. O, bu dönemde düşünce akımlarının etkisiyle gelişen inanç problemleri karşısında geleneksel yöntem ve bilgi birikiminin etkinliğini gündeme getirmiştir. Mustafa Sabri, İslam’ın temel kaynaklarından biri olan sünnet ve bunun kayıt altına alındığı rivayetleri içeren muteber (...) hadis kaynaklarının metot ve sıhhat açısından son derece güvenilir olduğunu ve itikadî konularda belirleyici olduğunu vurgulamıştır. Mustafa Sabri’nin sünnet tasavvurunu göstermesi açısından onun nüzûl-i Îsâ konusundaki görüşleri önemli bir örnektir. O, nüzûl-i Îsâ hadisesi hakkındaki yaklaşımını, Mahmut Şeltut’a yönelik itirazlarıyla ortaya koymaktadır. O, bu hadisenin Hz. Peygamber’in gayba ilişkin verdiği haberlerden biri olması ve kıyamet alametlerinden sayılması noktasında, sünnetin kaynaklığını öne çıkarmaktadır. Nüzûl-i Îsâ’nın gerçekleşme imkânını günümüzde sıhhati açısından problemli kabul edilen rivayetler, sahabe, tabiûn ve sonraki İslam âlimlerinin ortaya koyduğu yaklaşım ve hadis kaynaklarına duyduğu itimat üzerinden inşa etmektedir. Mustafa Sabri bu anlamda geleneksel birikimi öne çıkaran bir sünnet tasavvuru ortaya koymaktadır. Bu kapsamda çalışmamız Mustafa Sabri’nin nüzûl-i Îsâ çerçevesinde sünnetin kaynaklığına ilişkin yaklaşımını ele almayı amaçlamaktadır. (shrink)

We show that the lattices of the normal extensions of four well-known logics—propositional intuitionistic logic \, Grzegorczyk logic \, modalized Heyting calculus \ and \—can be joined in a commutative diagram. One connection of this diagram is an isomorphism between the lattices of the normal extensions of \ and \; we show some preservation properties of this isomorphism. Two other connections are join semilattice epimorphims of the lattice of the normal extensions of \ onto that of \ and of the (...) lattice of the normal extensions of \ onto that of \. The link between \ and \ is a well-known isomorphism established by the Blok–Esakia theorem. (shrink)

While the problem of nihilism is derived from a particular historical and intellectual context in Western philosophy, i.e., the pantheism controversy in modern German philosophy and the ideas of Nietzsche, non-Western thinkers also engaged with it and developed responses to it. In this article, I am interested in analyzing Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938), a leading Muslim thinker (a Sufi) from India, engagement with the problem of nihilism and his response to it from a Sufi perspective. Arguing that the existing literature on (...) Iqbal fails to understand the deeper impact of Nietzsche’s ideas on Iqbal’s philosophy and the dramatic role “the problem of nihilism” played in causing changes in Iqbal’s philosophy, or on Iqbal’s intellectual development, in this article, I analyze how Iqbal’s encounter with the ideas of Nietzsche during his study period in Europe between 1905 and 1908 has introduced him to the problem of nihilism in its Nietzschean form, how this led Iqbal to a nihilistic mood/crisis from 1909 to 1913, and then how he later developed a response to nihilism by reconstructing the Sufi cosmology and by revaluating the Sufi values of the pantheistic/Persian type of Sufism – the outcome of which is found in his philosophical poemAsrar-i-Khudî(1915). (shrink)

Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 has been implicated in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis. Here, we demonstrate that overexpression of p25, an activator of cdk5, led to increased levels of BACE1 mRNA and protein in vitro and in vivo. A p25/cdk5 responsive region containing multiple sites for signal transducer and activator of transcription was identified in the BACE1 promoter. STAT3 interacts with the BACE1 promoter, and p25-overexpressing mice had elevated levels of pSTAT3 and BACE1, whereas cdk5-deficient mice had reduced levels. Furthermore, mice with a (...) targeted mutation in the STAT3 cdk5 responsive site had lower levels of BACE1. Increased BACE levels in p25 overexpressing mice correlated with enhanced amyloidogenic processing that could be reversed by a cdk5 inhibitor. These data demonstrate a pathway by which p25/cdk5 increases the amyloidogenic processing of APP through STAT3-mediated transcriptional control of BACE1 that could have implications for AD pathogenesis. (shrink)