The civil rights, antiwar, and student upheavals of our day have served, aside from their primary objectives, to reawaken our consciousness of the basic problems of ethical and political obligation.

Sibley was a prolific writer and speaker on pacifism, civil disobedience, and utopianism. His many publications include articles and books on these topics. My favorite is his highly respected The Quiet Battle: Writings on the Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Resistance, an anthology of major-–as well as less well-known—sources on pacifism and nonviolence, meticulously edited, with rich and insightful introductions and concluding reflections by Sibley. There are many tales to be told of Sibley’s adventures as a pacifist (...) in the academy from the early 1940s to the late 1980s. One particularly telling episode --revived by Tim Brady in the Winter 2016 edition of the Minnesota Alumni Magazine--is sufficient to describe the character of this man. (shrink)

A complete collection of Frank Sibley's articles on philosophical aesthetics, this volume includes five, remarkable, hitherto unpublished papers written in Sibley's later years. It addresses many topics, among them the nature of aesthetic qualities versus non-aesthetic qualities, the relation of aesthetic description to aesthetic evaluation, the different levels of evaluation, and the objectivity of aesthetic judgement. The later papers constitute both a significant development of Sibley's individual approach to aesthetics, such as his discussion of the distinction between (...) attributive and predicative uses of adjectives and of the aesthetic significance of tastes and smells, a topic Sibley considered to be much neglected. (shrink)

Geographies of Exclusion identifies forms of social and spatial exclusion and subsequently examines the fate of knowledge of space and society which has been produced by members of excluded groups. Evaluating writing on urban society by women and black writers, David Sibley asks why such work is neglected by the academic establishment, suggesting that both the practices which result in the exclusion of minorities and those which result in the exclusion of knowledge have important implications for theory and method (...) in human geography. Drawing on a range of ideas from social anthropology, feminist theory, sociology, human geography and psychoanalysis, this book presents a fresh approach to geographical theory, highlighting the tendency of powerful groups to "purify" space and to view minorites as defiled and polluting, and exploring the nature of "difference" and the production of knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Riff on Infant Feeding Ethical Questions about Infant Feeding Closing Thoughts on Classification and Responsibility Notes.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

BackgroundCurrent guidelines do not clearly outline when assent should be attained from paediatric research participants, nor do they detail the necessary elements of the assent process. This stems from the fact that the fundamental justification behind the concept of assent is misunderstood. In this paper, we critically assess three widespread ethical arguments used for assent: children’s rights, the best interests of the child, and respect for a child’s developing autonomy. We then outline a newly-developed two-fold justification for the assent process: (...) respect for the parent’s pedagogical role in teaching their child to become an autonomous being and respect for the child’s moral worth.DiscussionWe argue that the ethical grounding for the involvement of young children in medical decision-making does not stem from children’s rights, the principle of best interests, or respect for developing autonomy. An alternative strategy is to examine the original motivation to engage with the child. In paediatric settings there are two obligations on the researcher: an obligation to the parents who are responsible for determining when and under what circumstances the child develops his capacity for autonomy and reasoning, and an obligation to the child himself. There is an important distinction between respecting a decision and encouraging a decision. This paper illustrates that the process of assent is an important way in which respect for the child as an individual can be demonstrated, however, the value lies not in the child’s response but the fact that his views were solicited in the first place.SummaryThis paper demonstrates that the common justifications for the process of assent are incomplete. Assent should be understood as playing a pedagogical role for the child, helping to teach him how specific decisions are made and therefore helping him to become a better decision-maker. How the researcher engages with the child supports his obligation to the child’s parents, yet why the researcher engages with the child stems from the child’s moral worth. Treating a child as having moral worth need not mean doing what they say but it may mean listening, considering, engaging or involving them in the decision. (shrink)

A recent article from Archives of Disease in Childhood outlined problems with the act of gaining child assent for research participation. However the arguments used in the article are incomplete or misguided. Rather than being harmful, assent should be seen as an ethically-appropriate way in which we can engage with the child about his participation in research. While additional clarification of the concept of assent is needed, the child's family context can provide us with a valuable guide to the way (...) we involve him in the decision-making process. (shrink)

Man (Islam); Islamic philosophy; Islamic ethics.

The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed thesequence encoderis used to learn nearly 75,000 wordform representations through exposure to strings of stress‐marked phonemes or letters. First, the mechanisms and efficacy of the sequence encoder are demonstrated and shown to overcome problems with traditional slot‐based (...) codes. Then, two large‐scale simulations are reported that learned to represent lexicons of either phonological or orthographic wordforms. In doing so, the models learned the statistics of their lexicons as shown by better processing of well‐formed pseudowords as opposed to ill‐formed (scrambled) pseudowords, and by accounting for variance in well‐formedness ratings. It is discussed how the sequence encoder may be integrated into broader models of lexical processing. (shrink)

Toxoplasma gondii is a highly successful parasite capable of infecting virtually all warm-blooded animals by actively invading nucleated host cells and forming a modified compartment where it replicates within the cytosol. The parasite-containing vacuole provides a safe haven, even in professional phagocytes such as macrophages, which normally destroy foreign microbes. In an effort to eliminate the parasite, the host up-regulates a family of immunity-related p47 GTPases (IRGs), which are recruited to the parasite-containing vacuole, resulting in membrane rupture and digestion of (...) the parasite. To avoid this fate, highly virulent strains of Toxoplasma coat the external surface of their vacuole with a secretory serine/threonine kinase, known as ROP18. At this host-pathogen interface, ROP18 phosphorylates and inactivates IRGs, thereby protecting the parasite from killing. These findings reveal a novel molecular mechanism by which the parasite disarms host innate immunity. (shrink)

The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed thesequence encoderis used to learn nearly 75,000 wordform representations through exposure to strings of stress‐marked phonemes or letters. First, the mechanisms and efficacy of the sequence encoder are demonstrated and shown to overcome problems with traditional slot‐based (...) codes. Then, two large‐scale simulations are reported that learned to represent lexicons of either phonological or orthographic wordforms. In doing so, the models learned the statistics of their lexicons as shown by better processing of well‐formed pseudowords as opposed to ill‐formed (scrambled) pseudowords, and by accounting for variance in well‐formedness ratings. It is discussed how the sequence encoder may be integrated into broader models of lexical processing. (shrink)

An enquiry into plant consciousness requires, on the one hand, taking into account recent experiments in plant biology and, on the other hand, refining the theoretical framework of behaviour and the various degrees of cognition. The main goal of this contribution is to advance such a framework by comparing classical animal and human cognition approaches with the theories of minimal cognition. This leads us to interpret more carefully the various plant activities and to highlight the limits of classical theories of (...) zoocentric cognition. In particular, the article shows that the notions of cognition and consciousness are often abusively confused, and with that of behaviour. Once this ambiguity is removed, it is possible to better distinguish several meanings of consciousness and to evaluate their relevance to plant activities. (shrink)