I. Kant: perfection within the structure of the aesthetic field of metaphysics

The subject of this research is the interrelation between aesthetics and metaphysics as it is reflected in the Kantian transcendentalism. In the “Critique of Judgment”, Kant assumes that the representation of perfection does not correlate with such on the sense of delight; thus, in the first introduction to the “Critique of Judgment”, he is far from considering the solutions to the problem of interrelation between perfection and aesthetic sense of delight persuasive. However, the attitude towards perfection transforms in Kant's later works, the analysis of which demonstrates that the idea of perfection, in essence, is conceived as the method for founding the entire aesthetics, its initial category of the beautiful that coincides with the meaning of the aesthetic perfection the beauty is genuine. The metaphysics of perfection, contained in considered Kant’s work, offers a new perspective on the categorical apparatus of Kantian aesthetics, formed in the “Critique of Judgment”, and broadens the representation on Kantian aesthetics as part of transcendental metaphysics. The concept of perfection implies various aspects of metaphysical research, retaining its immanent qualities in the aesthetics. In predication as an act of modern aesthetic expression, it is difficult to determine any stages and structures that can correlate specifically to perfectionism. The question concerning the field of such correlations remains controversial, inclusive of modern Russian philosophy.

Smuggling, ergativity, and the final-over-final condition

This paper argues that the lack of SVO ergative languages (“Mahajan’s Generalization”; see Taraldsen 2017) can be explained by the combination of a smuggling analysis of ergative alignments and the Final-over-Final-Condition (FOFC), which bans orders where a head-final category has a head-initial category in its Specifier (the head-initial category may have moved there, given the prevalence of roll-up derivations in surface head-final languages). The smuggling derivation, when the smuggled category is internally head-initial, creates a configuration which violates FOFC. For this reason, SVO and ergativity do not combine in the world’s languages, a notable typological lacuna that has hitherto defied explanation. The implications of the analysis for V-initial ergative languages and for passives are briefly explored.

Definition of the Response to Initial Therapy with Radioiodine in Patients with Differentiated Thyroid Carcinoma: Basal or Stimulated Thyroglobulin?

Basal thyroglobulin (b-Tg) measured with second-generation assay or stimulated Tg (s-Tg) can be used to define the response to therapy of differentiated thyroid carcinoma. However, they do not always define the same category and guidelines do not establish “if” or “when” s-Tg needs to be obtained. We studied 304 patients without clinically apparent disease or disease detected by neck ultrasonography and without anti-Tg antibodies 9–12 months after therapy. Based on b-Tg, 196 patients had an excellent response and 108 had an indeterminate response. Based on s-Tg, a change in category occurred in 10.2% of the patients with an initial excellent response (all to indeterminate response) and in half the patients with an initial indeterminate response (44.4% to excellent response and 5.5% to biochemical incomplete response). One case of recurrence was observed among patients with an initial excellent response but whose response changed to indeterminate after s-Tg, while no disease was detected among those who remained in the initial category; however, this difference was not significant. In patients with an initial indeterminate response, no recurrence was detected among those whose response changed to excellent after s-Tg, while 11.1 and 33.3% of those who remained in the initial category or whose response changed to biochemical incomplete, respectively, had structural disease. This study suggest that, in low- or intermediate-risk patients, s-Tg better defines the response to therapy with 131I when it is classified as indeterminate based on b-Tg using second-generation assay. However, s-Tg is not necessary when b-Tg defines the response as excellent.

Operative Adaptive Systems

This chapter details the findings and analysis for operative adaptive systems. Four earthquake response and recovery systems included in this study fall in this initial category of operative adaptive systems: the 1999 Duzce, Turkey, earthquake; the 2009 Padang, Indonesia, earthquake; the 2011 Tohoku, Japan, earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear breach; and the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. All four response systems share the characteristic of seeking to adapt rapidly to an environment suddenly altered by a major earthquake. Yet, the capacity of each governmental system to extend the process of adaptation beyond the immediate response into a newly re-stabilized recovery system varied markedly, depending on the scale of the destruction incurred, the scope of reconstruction required, and the rate of change over time needed for recovery. Moreover, while each of these four cases exhibited some capacity in technical and social areas, none had strong midlevel networks that could bridge national and local functions easily.

A Syntactic Universal and Its Consequences

This article investigates the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC): a head-initial category cannot be the immediate structural complement of a head-final category within the same extended projection. This universal cannot be formulated without reference to the kind of hierarchical structure generated by standard models of phrase structure. First, we document the empirical evidence: logically possible but crosslinguistically unattested combinations of head-final and head-initial orders. Second, we propose a theory, based on a version of Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom, where FOFC is an effect of the distribution of a movement-triggering feature in extended projections, subject to Relativized Minimality.

A coherence theorem for Martin-Löf's type theory

In type theory a proposition is represented by a type, the type of its proofs. As a consequence, the equality relation on a certain type is represented by a binary family of types. Equality on a type may be conventional or inductive. Conventional equality means that one particular equivalence relation is singled out as the equality, while inductive equality – which we also call identity – is inductively defined as the ‘smallest reflexive relation’. It is sometimes convenient to know that the type representing a proposition is collapsed, in the sense that all its inhabitants are identical. Although uniqueness of identity proofs for an arbitrary type is not derivable inside type theory, there is a large class of types for which it may be proved. Our main result is a proof that any type with decidable identity has unique identity proofs. This result is convenient for proving that the class of types with decidable identities is closed under indexed sum. Our proof of the main result is completely formalized within a kernel fragment of Martin-Löf's type theory and mechanized using ALF. Proofs of auxiliary lemmas are explained in terms of the category theoretical properties of identity. These suggest two coherence theorems as the result of rephrasing the main result in a context of conventional equality, where the inductive equality has been replaced by, in the former, an initial category structure and, in the latter, a smallest reflexive relation.