Striving for the Impossible : The Hegelian background of Judith Butler

This study analyses the Hegelian roots of the subject-theory and the political theory of Judith Butler. Butler can be seen as the author of "gender performativity". Butler claims that subject's identities are linquistic "terms". Linquistic identities are performative and normative: they produce, according to cultural rules, the identities which they just claim to describe. Butler's theory of the performativity of identities is based on her theory of identities as "ek-static" constructions. This means that there is a relation between the self and the Other in the heart of identities. It is claimed in this study that Butler's theory of the relation between the self and the Other, or, between the subject and the constitutive outside, is based on G.W.F. Hegel's theory of the dialectics of recognition in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Especially the sections dealing with the relation between "Lord" and "Bondsman" set the theoretical base for Butler's theory. Further, it is claimed that Hegel's own solution for the enslaving and instrumentalizing relation between the self and the Other, reciprocal recognition, remains an important alternative to the postmodernist conception supported by political theorists like Butler. Chapter 2, on Hegel, goes through the dialectics of recognition between the self and the Other in The Phenomenology of Spirit up until the ideal of reciprocal recognition and absolute knowledge. Chapter 3 introduces two French interpretations of Hegel, by Alexandre Kojéve and Louis Althusser. Both of these interpretations, especially the Kojevian one, have deeply influenced the contemporary understanding of Hegel as well as the contemporary thought - presented e.g. in the postmodern political thought - on the relations between the self and the Other. The Kojévian Marxist utopia with its notion of "the End of History" as well as the Althusserian theory of the Interpellative formation of subjects have influenced how Hegel's theory of the self and the Other have travelled into Butler's thought. In chapter 5 these influences are analyzed in detail. According to the analysis, Butler, like numerous other poststructuralist theorists, accepts Kojéve's interpretation as basically correct, but rejects his vision of "the End of History" as static and totalitarian. Kojéve's utopian philosophy of history is replaced by the paradoxical idea of an endless striving towards emancipation which, however, could not and should not be reached. In chapter 6 Butler's theory is linked to another postmodern political theory, that of Chantal Mouffe. It is argued that Mouffe's theory is based on a similar view of the relation of the self and the other as Butler's theory. The former, however, deals explicitly with politics. Therefore, it makes the central paradox of striving for the impossible more visible; such a theory is unable to guide political action. Hegel actually anticipated this kind of theorizing in his critique of "Unhappy Consciousness" in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Keywords: Judith Butler, G.W.F. Hegel, Chantal Mouffe, Alexandre Kojéve, Postmodernism, Politics, Identities, Performativity, Self-consciousness, Other

Essays on Russia's Economic Transition

This study comprises an introductory section and three essays analysing Russia's economic transition from the early 1990s up to the present. The papers present a combination of both theoretical and empirical analysis on some of the key issues Russia has faced during its somewhat troublesome transformation from state-controlled command economy to market-based economy. The first essay analyses fiscal competition for mobile capital between identical regions in a transition country. A standard tax competition framework is extended to account for two features of a transition economy: the presence of two sectors, old and new, which differ in productivity; and a non-benevolent regional decision-maker. It is shown that in very early phase of transition, when the old sector clearly dominates, consumers in a transition economy may be better off in a competitive equilibrium. Decision-makers, on the other hand, will prefer to coordinate their fiscal policies. The second essay uses annual data for 1992-2003 to examine income dispersion and convergence across 76 Russian regions. Wide disparities in income levels have indeed emerged during the transition period. Dispersion has increased most among the initially better-off regions, whereas for the initially poorer regions no clear trend of divergence or convergence could be established. Further, some - albeit not highly robust - evidence was found of both unconditional and conditional convergence, especially among the initially richer regions. Finally, it is observed that there is much less evidence of convergence after the economic crisis of 1998. The third essay analyses industrial firms' engagement in provision of infrastructure services, such as heating, electricity and road maintenance. Using a unique dataset of 404 large and medium-sized industrial enterprises in 40 regions of Russia, the essay examines public infrastructure provision by Russian industrial enterprises. It is found that to a large degree engagement in infrastructure provision, as proxied by district heating production, is a Soviet legacy. Secondly, firms providing district heating to users outside their plant area are more likely to have close and multidimensional relations with the local public sector.

Socialist Realism instead of Formalism : the Formation and Development of the Soviet Music Control System 1932-1950

Whereas it has been widely assumed in the public that the Soviet music policy system had a “top-down” structure of control and command that directly affected musical creativity, in fact my research shows that the relations between the different levels of the music policy system were vague, and the viewpoints of its representatives differed from each other. Because the representatives of the party and government organs controlling operas could not define which kind of music represented Socialist Realism, the system as it developed during the 1930s and 1940s did not function effectively enough in order to create such a centralised control of Soviet music, still less could Soviet operas fulfil the highly ambiguous aesthetics of Socialist Realism. I show that musical discussions developed as bureaucratic ritualistic arenas, where it became more important to reveal the heretical composers, making scapegoats of them, and requiring them to perform self-criticism, than to give directions on how to reach the artistic goals of Socialist Realism. When one opera was found to be unacceptable, this lead to a strengthening of control by the party leadership, which lead to more operas, one after the other, to be revealed as failures. I have studied the control of the composition, staging and reception of the opera case-studies, which remain obscure in the West despite a growing scholarly interest in them, and have created a detailed picture of the foundation and development of the Soviet music control system in 1932-1950. My detailed discussion of such case-studies as Ivan Dzerzhinskii’s The Quiet Don, Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Vano Muradeli’s The Great Friendship, Sergei Prokofiev’s Story of a Real Man, Tikhon Khrennikov’s Frol Skobeev and Evgenii Zhukovskii’s From All One’s Heart backs with documentary precision the historically revisionist model of the development of Soviet music. In February 1948, composers belonging to the elite of the Union of Soviet Composers, e.g. Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, were accused in a Central Committee Resolution of formalism, as been under the influence of western modernism. Accusations of formalism were connected to the criticism of the conciderable financial, material and social privileges these composers enjoyed in the leadership of the Union. With my new archival findings I give a more detailed picture of the financial background for the 1948 campaign. The independent position of the music funding organization of the Union of Soviet Composers (Muzfond) to decide on its finances was an exceptional phenomenon in the Soviet Union and contradicted the strivings to strengthen the control of Soviet music. The financial audits of the Union of Soviet Composers did not, however, change the elite status of some of its composers, except for maybe a short duration in some cases. At the same time the independence of the significal financial authorities of Soviet theatres was restricted. The cuts in the governmental funding allocated to Soviet theatres contradicted the intensified ideological demands for Soviet operas.

Things you don't want to know about yourself: Ambivalence about tracking and sharing personal information for behaviour change

Technologies that facilitate the collection and sharing of personal information can feed people's desire for enhanced self-knowledge and help them to change their behaviour, yet for various reasons people can also be reluctant to use such technologies. This paper explores this tension through an interview study in the context of smoking cessation. Our findings show that smokers and recent ex-smokers were ambivalent about their behaviour change as well as about collecting personal information through technology and sharing it with other users. We close with a summary of three challenges emerging from such ambivalence and directions to address them.

Essays in Philosophical Moral Psychology

The dissertation consists of four essays and a comprehensive introduction that discusses the topics, methods, and most prominent theories of philosophical moral psychology. I distinguish three main questions: What are the essential features of moral thinking? What are the psychological conditions of moral responsibility? And finally, what are the consequences of empirical facts about human nature to normative ethics? Each of the three last articles focuses on one of these issues. The first essay and part of the introduction are dedicated to methodological questions, in particular the relationship between empirical (social) psychology and philosophy. I reject recent attempts to understand the nature of morality on the basis of empirical research. One characteristic feature of moral thinking is its practical clout: if we regard an action as morally wrong, we either refrain from doing it even against our desires and interests, or else feel shame or guilt. Moral views seem to have a conceptual connection to motivation and emotions – roughly speaking, we can’t conceive of someone genuinely disapproving an action, but nonetheless doing it without any inner motivational conflict or regret. This conceptual thesis in moral psychology is called (judgment) internalism. It implies, among other things, that psychopaths cannot make moral judgments to the extent that they are incapable of corresponding motivation and emotion, even if they might say largely the words we would expect. Is internalism true? Recently, there has been an explosion of interest in so-called experimental philosophy, which is a methodological view according to which claims about conceptual truths that appeal to our intuitions should be tested by way of surveys presented to ordinary language users. One experimental result is that the majority of people are willing to grant that psychopaths make moral judgments, which challenges internalism. In the first article, ‘The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy’, I argue that these results pose no real threat to internalism, since experimental philosophy is based on a too simple conception of the relationship between language use and concepts. Only the reactions of competent users in pragmatically neutral and otherwise conducive circumstances yield evidence about conceptual truths, and such robust intuitions remain inaccessible to surveys for reasons of principle. The epistemology of folk concepts must still be based on Socratic dialogue and critical reflection, whose character and authority I discuss at the end of the paper. The internal connection between moral judgment and motivation led many metaethicists in the past century to believe along Humean lines that judgment itself consists in a pro-attitude rather than a belief. This expressivist view, as it is called these days, has far-reaching consequences in metaethics. In the second essay I argue that perhaps the most sophisticated form of contemporary expressivism, Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivism, according to which moral judgments are decisions or contingency plans, is implausible from the perspective of the theory of action. In certain circumstances it is possible to think that something is morally required of one without deciding to do so. Morality is not a matter of the will. Instead, I sketch on the basis of Robert Brandom’s inferentialist semantics a weak form of judgment internalism, according to which the content of moral judgment is determined by a commitment to a particular kind of practical reasoning. The last two essays in the dissertation emphasize the role of mutual recognition in the development and maintenance of responsible and autonomous moral agency. I defend a compatibilist view of autonomy, according to which agents who are unable to recognize right and wrong or act accordingly are not responsible for their actions – it is not fair to praise or blame them, since they lacked the relevant capacity to do otherwise. Conversely, autonomy demands an ability to recognize reasons and act on them. But as a long tradition in German moral philosophy whose best-known contemporary representative is Axel Honneth has it, both being aware of reasons and acting on them requires also the right sort of higher-order attitudes toward the self. Without self-respect and self-confidence we remain at the mercy of external pressures, even if we have the necessary normative competence. These attitudes toward the self, in turn, are formed through mutual recognition – we value ourselves when those who we value value us. Thus, standing in the right sort of relations of recognition is indirectly necessary for autonomy and moral responsibility. Recognition and valuing are concretely manifest in actions and institutions, whose practices make possible participation on an equal footing. Seeing this opens the way for a kind of normative social criticism that is grounded in the value of freedom and automomy, but is not limited to defending negative rights. It thus offers a new way to bridge the gap between liberalism and communitarianism.

The Restless Love of Thinking : The Concept Liebe in Hegel's Philosophy

The German philosopher G.W.F.Hegel (1770–1831) is best known for his idealistic system philosophy, his concept of spirit [Geist] and for his dictum that the existing and the rational overlap. This thesis offers a new perspective: it examines the working of the concept ‘love’ in Hegel’s philosophy by looking at the contexts and function he puts it to, from his earliest writings to the very last lectures he gave. The starting point of the inquiry is that he applied the concept Liebe to different contexts for different purposes, but each time to provide an answer to a specific philosophical problem. His formulation, reformulation and use of ‘love’ give possible solutions to problems the solving of which was crucial to the development of his thought as a whole. The study is divided into three parts, each analysing the different problems and solutions to which Hegel applied the concept of love. The first part, "Love, morality and ethical life", examines these interconnected themes in Hegel’s early work. The main questions he addressed during this period concerned how to unite Kant’s philosophy and the Greek ideal of the good life. In this context, the concept ‘love’ did three things. First, it served to formulate his grounding idea of the relation between unity and difference, or the manifold. Secondly, it was the key to his attempt to base an ideal folk religion on Christianity interpreted as a religion of love. Finally, it provided the means to criticise Kant’s moral philosophy. The question of the moral value of love helped Hegel to break away from Kant’s thought and develop his own theory about love and ethical life. The second part of the study, "Love and the political realm", considers the way 'Liebe' functions in connection with questions concerning the community and political life in Hegel’s work. In addition to questioning the universal applicability of the concept of recognition as a key to his theory of social relations, the chapters focus on gender politics and the way he conceptualised the gender category ‘woman’ through the concept ‘love’. Another line of inquiry is the way the figure of Antigone was used to conceptualise the differentiated spheres of action for men and women, and the part ‘love’ played in Hegel’s description of Antigone’s motives. Thirdly, Hegel’s analogy of the family and the state and the way ‘love’ functions in an attempt to promote understanding of the relation between citizens and the state are examined. The third and final part of the study, "Love as absolute spirit", focuses on ‘love’ within Hegel’s systemic thought and the way he continued to characterise Geist through the language of Liebe up until and including his very last works. It is shown how Liebe functions in his hierarchical organisation of the domains of art, religion and philosophy, and how both art and religion end up in similar structural positions with regard to philosophy. One recurrent theme in the third part is Hegel’s complex relation to Romantic thought. Another line of investigation is how he reconstructed Christianity as a religion of love in his mature work. In striking contrast to his early thought, in his last works Hegel introduced a new concept of love that incorporated negativity, and that could also function as the root of political action.

Lapset ja nuoret ympäristökansalaisina : Ympäristökasvatuksen näkökulma osallistumiseen

Children and young people as environmental citizens the environmental education perspective to participation This doctoral thesis examines the participation of children and young people in developing their own environment at school, as a part of environmental education. The aim of the research is to assess and consider children and young people s environmentally responsible participation and its effectiveness in relation to the participants own learning and the end results of the participation. The research combines the perspectives of environmental education and citizenship education through the concept of environmental citizenship. Environmental education, which enhances environmental citizenship, offers children and young people the possibility to be active citizens and learn about citizenship in their own lives by taking action themselves. The research is made up of two parts which complement each other. The first part consists of an action research carried out in the Joensuu Lyseo Upper Secondary School, where an environmental education course with a traffic-related theme was planned, developed and evaluated. The second part is made up of an interview survey carried out in Helsinki. In the survey actors from schools and various city offices, who were involved in development projects of school environments, were interviewed. According to the research results, all-round cooperation and more open relations with those outside of the school environment are important ways to support environmental citizenship in schools. Thus, environmentally responsible participation offers a chance to learn competence that an environmental citizen needs the knowledge, skills and willingness to act that have not been successfully taught through traditional school education. The research introduces a model of environmentally responsible participation as a learning process, in which learning is studied through the development of competence, self-empowerment and social empowerment. The model makes the context of environmental education visible and puts emphasis on reflection in the learning process. A central factor in children and young people s self-empowerment is the sense of being heard and taken into consideration. At the moment children and young people s rights to participate are strong, due to legislation, school curricula, and several national and international agreements. Despite this, involving them in developing their own immediate surroundings has not become a part of schools and planning organisations daily life and established methods. Reasons for this situation can be found in the lack of regard and resources for these matters, in the complex nature of planning and a long time frame, and the problems of ownership and of reaching each other. Central to overcoming these obstacles are a gradual change in conduct and mentalities and the strengthening of teachers and officials competence. Children and young people need different ways and methods of varying levels of involvement, structures and arenas which enable participation and in which environmental citizenship can be realized. Key words: environmental citizenship, environmental education, citizenship education, children and young people s participation, social learning, self-empowerment, social empowerment, school, community planning

The visual preferences for forest regeneration and field afforestation - four case studies in Finland

The overall aim of this dissertation was to study the public's preferences for forest regeneration fellings and field afforestations, as well as to find out the relations of these preferences to landscape management instructions, to ecological healthiness, and to the contemporary theories for predicting landscape preferences. This dissertation includes four case studies in Finland, each based on the visualization of management options and surveys. Guidelines for improving the visual quality of forest regeneration and field afforestation are given based on the case studies. The results show that forest regeneration can be connected to positive images and memories when the regeneration area is small and some time has passed since the felling. Preferences may not depend only on the management alternative itself but also on the viewing distance, viewing point, and the scene in which the management options are implemented. The current Finnish forest landscape management guidelines as well as the ecological healthiness of the studied options are to a large extent compatible with the public's preferences. However, there are some discrepancies. For example, the landscape management instructions as well as ecological hypotheses suggest that the retention trees need to be left in groups, whereas people usually prefer individually located retention trees to those trees in groups. Information and psycho-evolutionary theories provide some possible explanations for people's preferences for forest regeneration and field afforestation, but the results cannot be consistently explained by these theories. The preferences of the different stakeholder groups were very similar. However, the preference ratings of the groups that make their living from forest - forest owners and forest professionals - slightly differed from those of the others. These results provide support for the assumptions that preferences are largely consistent at least within one nation, but that knowledge and a reference group may also influence preferences.

Spatial ecology of an oak-associated herbivore community : A metacommunity of herbivores

Habitat fragmentation is currently affecting many species throughout the world. As a consequence, an increasing number of species are structured as metapopulations, i.e. as local populations connected by dispersal. While excellent studies of metapopulations have accumulated over the past 20 years, the focus has recently shifted from single species to studies of multiple species. This has created the concept of metacommunities, where local communities are connected by the dispersal of one or several of their member species. To understand this higher level of organisation, we need to address not only the properties of single species, but also establish the importance of interspecific interactions. However, studies of metacommunities are so far heavily biased towards laboratory-based systems, and empirical data from natural systems are urgently needed. My thesis focuses on a metacommunity of insect herbivores on the pedunculate oak Quercus robur a tree species known for its high diversity of host-specific insects. Taking advantage of the amenability of this system to both observational and experimental studies, I quantify and compare the importance of local and regional factors in structuring herbivore communities. Most importantly, I contrast the impact of direct and indirect competition, host plant genotype and local adaptation (i.e. local factors) to that of regional processes (as reflected by the spatial context of the local community). As a key approach, I use general theory to generate testable hypotheses, controlled experiments to establish causal relations, and observational data to validate the role played by the pinpointed processes in nature. As the central outcome of my thesis, I am able to relegate local forces to a secondary role in structuring oak-based insect communities. While controlled experiments show that direct competition does occur among both conspecifics and heterospecifics, that indirect interactions can be mediated by both the host plant and the parasitoids, and that host plant genotype may affect local adaptation, the size of these effects is much smaller than that of spatial context. Hence, I conclude that dispersal between habitat patches plays a prime role in structuring the insect community, and that the distribution and abundance of the target species can only be understood in a spatial framework. By extension, I suggest that the majority of herbivore communities are dependent on the spatial structure of their landscape and urge fellow ecologists working on other herbivore systems to either support or refute my generalization.

Destinations, disasters and public relations: Stakeholder engagement in multi-phase disaster management

Research about disasters in tourism has emerged in earnest since the 1990s covering insights for preparedness and response. However, recently, authors have called for more systematic and holistic approaches to tourism disaster management research. To address this gap, this study adopted a public relations perspective to refocus attention to relationships and stakeholder expectations of destination communities across multiple phases of disaster management. The authors used a mixed method approach and developed a battery of disaster management attributes by conducting interviews and analyzing industry documents and the extant literature. These attributes formed part of a survey of tourism businesses. Exploratory factor analysis resulted in a two factor solution: - i) business disaster preparedness, and; - ii) destination disaster response and recovery. Findings also show that participants reported a gap between the importance and destination performance of these attributes. In particular, tourism businesses perceived destinations did not adequately engage in disaster preparedness activities, which had implications for disaster response and recovery.

Self and peer review in dance classes using personal video feedback

Many forms of formative feedback are used in dance training to refine the dancer’s spatial and kinaesthetic awareness in order that the dancer’s sensorimotor intentions and observable danced outcomes might converge. This paper documents the use of smartphones to record and playback movement sequences in ballet and contemporary technique classes. Peers in pairs took turns filming one another and then analysing the playback. This provided immediate visual feedback of the movement sequence as performed by each dancer. This immediacy facilitated the dancer’s capacity to associate what they felt as they were dancing with what they looked like during the dance. The often-dissonant realities of self-perception and perception by others were thus guided towards harmony, generating improved performance and knowledge relating to dance technique. An approach is offered for potential development of peer review activities to support summative progressive assessment in dance technique training.

Practising Western Science Outside the West: Personal Observations on the Indian Scene

Modern science, which was an indigenous product of Western culture, is now being practised in many non-Western countries. This paper discusses the peculiar social, cultural and intellectual problems which scientists of these non-Western countries face in adopting Western science in their situations, with special reference to India. It is pointed out that, in addition to money and communication, it is necessary to have a proper psychological gestalt to practise science satisfactorily. The author analyzes his experience as a physics student in India and in the United States to clarify the nature of this psychological gestalt, and to explain what makes it difficult for non-Western scientists to acquire it.

Changing trends in counselling: A counselling psychologist's personal journey

The paper follows the development of "counselling" from the talking cures of ancient times through Chaucer's tales to the recent history of therapies in the Western world. The roles played by various leaders in the field is explored. Finally the therapies in vogue more recent decades are introduced.

A cloud-based intelligent computing system for contextual exploration on personal sleep-tracking data using association rule mining

With the development of wearable and mobile computing technology, more and more people start using sleep-tracking tools to collect personal sleep data on a daily basis aiming at understanding and improving their sleep. While sleep quality is influenced by many factors in a person’s lifestyle context, such as exercise, diet and steps walked, existing tools simply visualize sleep data per se on a dashboard rather than analyse those data in combination with contextual factors. Hence many people find it difficult to make sense of their sleep data. In this paper, we present a cloud-based intelligent computing system named SleepExplorer that incorporates sleep domain knowledge and association rule mining for automated analysis on personal sleep data in light of contextual factors. Experiments show that the same contextual factors can play a distinct role in sleep of different people, and SleepExplorer could help users discover factors that are most relevant to their personal sleep.

Common and rare variants of the renin-angiotensin system and their relation to antihypertensive drug responses

Most of the diseases affecting public health, like hypertension, are multifactorial by etiology. Hypertension is influenced by genetic, life style and environmental factors. Estimation of the influence of genes to the risk of essential hypertension varies from 30 to 50%. It is plausible that in most of the cases susceptibility to hypertension is determined by the action of more than one gene. Although the exact molecular mechanism underlying essential hypertension remains obscure, several monogenic forms of hypertension have been identified. Since common genetic variations may predict, not only to susceptibility to hypertension, but also response to antihypertensive drug therapy, pharmacogenetic approaches may provide useful markers in finding relations between candidate genes and phenotypes of hypertension. The aim of this study was to identify genetic mutations and polymorphisms contributing to human hypertension, and examine their relationships to intermediate phenotypes of hypertension, such as blood pressure (BP) responses to antihypertensive drugs or biochemical laboratory values. Two groups of patients were investigated in the present study. The first group was collected from the database of patients investigated in the Hypertension Outpatient Ward, Helsinki University Central Hospital, and consisted of 399 subjects considered to have essential hypertension. Frequncies of the mutant or variant alleles were compared with those in two reference groups, healthy blood donors (n = 301) and normotensive males (n = 175). The second group of subjects with hypertension was collected prospectively. The study subjects (n=313) underwent a protocol lasting eight months, including four one-month drug treatment periods with antihypertensive medications (thiazide diuretic, β-blocker, calcium channel antagonist, and an angiotensin II receptor antagonist). BP responses and laboratory values were related to polymorphims of several candidate genes of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS). In addition, two patients with typical features of Liddle’s syndrome were screened for mutations in kidney epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) subunits. Two novel mutations causing Liddle’s syndrome were identified. The first mutation identified located in the beta-subunit of ENaC and the second mutation found located in the gamma-subunit, constituting the first identified Liddle mutation locating in the extracellular domain. This mutation showed 2-fold increase in channel activity in vitro. Three gene variants, of which two are novel, were identified in ENaC subunits. The prevalence of the variants was three times higher in hypertensive patients (9%) than in reference groups (3%). The variant carriers had increased daily urinary potassium excretion rate in relation to their renin levels compared with controls suggesting increased ENaC activity, although in vitro they did not show increased channel activity. Of the common polymorphisms of the RAS studied, angiotensin II receptor type I (AGTR1) 1166 A/C polymorphism was associated with modest changes in RAS activity. Thus, patients homozygous for the C allele tended to have increased aldosterone and decreased renin levels. In vitro functional studies using transfected HEK293 cells provided additional evidence that the AGTR1 1166 C allele may be associated with increased expression of the AGTR1. Common polymorphisms of the alpha-adducin and the RAS genes did not significantly predict BP responses to one-month monotherapies with hydroclorothiazide, bisoprolol, amlodipin, or losartan. In conclusion, two novel mutations of ENaC subunits causing Liddle’s syndrome were identified. In addition, three common ENaC polymorphisms were shown to be associated with occurrence of essential hypertension, but their exact functional and clinical consequences remain to be explored. The AGTR1 1166 C allele may modify the endocrine phenotype of hypertensive patients, when present in homozygous form. Certain widely studied polymorphisms of the ACE, angiotensinogen, AGTR1 and alpha-adducin genes did not significantly affect responses to a thiazide, β-blocker, calcium channel antagonist, and angiotensin II receptor antagonist.