Clinical research is a necessity if effective and safe treatments are to be developed. However, this may well include the need for research that is best described as ‘invasive’ in that it may be associated with some discomfort or inconvenience. Limitations in the undertaking of invasive research involving people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are perhaps related to anxieties within the academic community and among ethics committees; however, the consequence of this neglect is that innovative treatments specific to people with ID (...) may not be developed. Such concerns are likely to continue while there is limited published knowledge regarding the actual experiences of people with ID who have participated in invasive clinical research. As part of a pilot study trialling the novel use of a surgically inserted device to curb overeating in people with Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS) we have investigated the experience of research through semistructured qualitative interviews involving three participants and their carers. Thematic analysis revealed that the adults with PWS and their family carers rated their participation positively, seeing it as a rewarding and enriching experience. This brief report discusses findings from our interview data in order to highlight strategies which may ensure that research is acceptable to participants, meets the necessary ethical standards and is able to achieve the aims set out by the researchers. To our knowledge, this is the first study to record experiences directly from people with PWS and their carers regarding their involvement in invasive clinical research. (shrink)

The term "Philosophic lyric".--Introductory chapter.--The "return to nature"; Wordsworth's "philosophy of nature".--The period between Wordsworth and Meredith.--Wordsworth and Meredith as poets of nature.--Browning and Meredith as poets of man.--Conclusion.

I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?” Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender (...) systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents. (shrink)

Renowned as the chief challenger of traditional views of morality, man's freedom, and religion from 1650-1750, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) spread alarm and ...

The final published book by Nobel Prize-winning author and philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), La pensée et le mouvant (translated here as The Creative Mind), is a masterly autobiography of his philosophical method. Through essays and lectures written between 1903 and 1923, Bergson retraces how and why he became a philosopher, and crafts a fascinating critique of philosophy itself. Until it leaves its false paths, he demonstrates, philosophy will remain only a wordy dialectic that surmounts false problems. With masterful skill and (...) intensity, Bergson shows that metaphysics and science must be rooted in experience for philosophy to become a genuine search for truth. And in the quest for unanswered questions, the spiritual dimension of human life and the importance of intuition must be emphasized. A source of inspiration for physicists as well as philosophers, Bergson's introduction to metaphysics reveals a philosophy that is always on the move, blending man's spiritual drive with his mastery of the material world. (shrink)

Paper 3 This paper discusses how patriarchy made the name 'man' their Brand. It would guarantee their entitlement to rule and control the masses by repeating man in so many names. Partial lists are shown.

The main claim in this article is that the traditionally Western and currently dominant understandings of the figures of “Nature” and “Animal” underlie and structure different forms of oppression and should be critically confronted. The racial-sexual subjugation of the colonized African draws symbolically on the older Western symbolic subjugations of Animal and Woman. In the Great Chain of Being of Western metaphysics it is Woman’s sexual body that links humans to the domain of the animal, and Man’s intellect that distinguishes (...) and separates humans from that same domain. Situated in the border between human and Animal, Woman merges with the chaos and fleshiness of Animal and Nature. With the emergence of race as a category of classification and colonial justification, the African is placed at the furthest remove from Western Man, the epitome of reasonable humanity. African Woman, in particular, is seen as the Animal Other. The colonial-“civilizing” project thus institutes a certain flight from Nat... (shrink)

side or other from his conception of reality ; for though some kind of reality is generally allowed to exist on the other side, ... Thus to the ordinary man philosophy seems to offer no choice, but either to destroy absolutely one half of his sense of ...

In this article the authors discuss in broad strokes the work of two theorists, namely Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Argentinian philosopher Maria Lugones to argue that a specific logic of sexualisation accompanied, permeated and coloured the colonial project of racialising the ‘native’. The sexual wound which to a great extent explains the abjection of the racialised body, is a key aspect of the colony and should therefore also be a central theme in any properly critical discourse on decolonisation in (...) Africa. After drawing on Oyĕwùmí and Lugones to make their central argument, the authors apply this framework to the problem of sexual violence in South Africa. Understanding the nature of the sexual-racial wound of coloniality will not only ensure that the problem of sexual violence gets properly addressed as a central question of decolonisation, but will also suggest new ways of concretely addressing the problem. In particular, the dominant discourse needs to shift away from the ‘emasculated man’ trope and towards a critical feminist decoloniality which views the radical dehumanisation of native woman as key to colonial violence understood as a world-destructive. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that selection history accounts of function can support a fully reductive naturalization of functional properties. I argue that this assumption is false. A problem with the alternative causal role account of function in this context is that it invokes the teleological notion of a goal in analysing real function. The selection history account, if it is to have reductive status, must not do the same. But attention to certain cases of selection history in biology, specifically those (...) involving meiotic drive, shows that selection historical explanations are available in the case of items without any plausible function. Making contributions to goals, here fitness, must be introduced as an additional constraint in the analysis, either explicitly, or implicitly by appeal to individual functions or the selection-of/selection-for distinction. (shrink)

In Sebastian Thrun, Lawrence K. Saul, and Bernhard Schölkopf (eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 497-504.

This paper describes a system for extracting typed dependency parses of English sentences from phrase structure parses. In order to capture inherent relations occurring in corpus texts that can be critical in real-world applications, many NP relations are included in the set of grammatical relations used. We provide a comparison of our system with Minipar and the Link parser. The typed dependency extraction facility described here is integrated in the Stanford Parser, available for download.

'Manning successfully argues that theory and ethics should once again be reunited...thorough and provocative...'—THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW.

We present a system for deciding whether a given sentence can be inferred from text. Each sentence is represented as a directed graph (extracted from a dependency parser) in which the nodes represent words or phrases, and the links represent syntactic and semantic relationships. We develop a learned graph matching model to approximate entailment by the amount of the sentence’s semantic content which is contained in the text. We present results on the Recognizing Textual Entailment dataset (Dagan et al., 2005), (...) and show that our approach outperforms Bag- Of-Words and TF-IDF models. (shrink)

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from _Thought in the Act _Combining philosophy and aesthetics, _Thought in the Act_ is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” (...) a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. _Thought in the Act_ enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

Turning to the moment when phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) meets process philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead), this article turns around three questions: (a) How does movement produce a body? (b) What kind of subject is introduced in the thought of Merleau-Ponty and how does this subject engage with or interfere with the activity here considered as ‘body’? (c) What happens when phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) meets process philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead)? and builds around three propositions (a) There is never a body as such: what (...) we know are edgings and contourings, forces and intensities: a body is its movement (b) Movement is not to be reduced to displacement (c) A philosophy of the body never begins with the body: it bodies. (shrink)

number of hidden categories is not fixed, but when the number of hidden states is unknown (Beal et al., 2002; Teh et al., 2006). can grow with the amount of training data.

This article explores the idea that affect is collective. By emphasizing that affect does not rest in the individual, a theory of affect is foregrounded that is in conversation with Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation, and, more specifically, the concept of the preindividual. The preindividual, in Simondon, is aligned with what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘a life’ — the force of living beyond life itself. This force of life, I suggest, is the resonant field of life’s outside, the more-than of human (...) life where the body is but one verging surface on the field of experience, where the body is always more than One. The more-than-Oneness of the body is always already collective, cutting as it does between life-welling and life-living. It is here, at this virtual-actual juncture, that the force of affect resides, activating the body-becoming. (shrink)

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Anna N. Rafferty and Christopher D. Manning Linguistics Department Computer Science Department Stanford University Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 Stanford, CA 94305 {rafferty,manning}@stanford.edu [email protected]..

Automatically clustering web pages into semantic groups promises improved search and browsing on the web. In this paper, we demonstrate how user-generated tags from largescale social bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us can be used as a complementary data source to page text and anchor text for improving automatic clustering of web pages. This paper explores the use of tags in 1) K-means clustering in an extended vector space model that includes tags as well as page text and 2) a novel (...) generative clustering algorithm based on latent Dirichlet allocation that jointly models text and tags. We evaluate the models by comparing their output to an established web directory. We find that the naive inclusion of tagging data improves cluster quality versus page text alone, but a more principled inclusion can substantially improve the quality of all models with a statistically signifi- cant absolute F-score increase of 4%. The generative model outperforms K-means with another 8% F-score increase. (shrink)

The relationship between psychology and Christian theology has been one of the most important topics in the science and religion field. Discussions, however, are too frequently one-sided. This book takes an alternative approach, following the lead of Fraser Watts, the contributions develop various aspects of the mutual enrichment of each discipline by the other. Beyond outdated models of conflict and independence, this book highlights areas of fruitful enhancement at the interface of Christian belief and practice with psychology. Set out in (...) four sections the book's chapters first engage methodological and substantive issues in the interdisciplinarity raised by the dialogue between psychology and theology. Secondly, chapters explore a variety of areas in which psychology enriches theology, looking at both historical and contemporary themes such as psychoanalysis, embodiment and mindfulness. Chapters in the third section explore some of the theological enrichments of psychology, with topics including character strengths, wisdom, and forgiveness. The final section engages aspects of the mutual enrichment in religious life and pastoral care with an applied focus on mental health, meditation, prayer, spiritual direction and spirituality. A refreshing alternative study of the mutual enrichment of psychology and theology with theoretical and practical applications, this book reinforces the need for both disciplines to pursue creative and constructive engagement with each other. Of interest to scholars in psychology, theology, religious studies this book will also be of interest more widely as a case study of successful interdisciplinary work. (shrink)

The life and work of Rousseau the musician and aesthetician has been largely neglected in the debate about Rousseau's views on women. In this paper, I shall introduce a new text and a new female figure into the conversation: Collette, the shepherdess in Le devin du village, an opera written by Rousseau in 1752. We see an ambiguity in Collette-the text often expresses one view while the music expresses another. When we take Collette's music seriously the following picture emerges: the (...) natural desire of women to be free, a fairly active female agency, an incipient rebellion against the social role of women, and a final acceptance of the role of wife. This view of Collette supports the thesis that for Rousseau women are not naturally subordinate to men but are taught to be subordinate because it is required for the maintenance of the patriarchal family, the cornerstone of civil society. We see many glimpses of Collette's true, unsocialized, nature, especially in the melodies she sings. It is in song, the first and hence most natural language of humans, that we see Collette's longing for freedom. But she ends by singing the praises of civil society, albeit a rural society, and thus implicitly accepting the subordination she is destined to suffer at Colin's hands. (shrink)

In _Always More Than One_, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning (...) connects this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation? (shrink)

Cross-sector development partnerships are project-based collaborative arrangements between business, government, and civil society organizations in support of international development goals such as sustainability, health education, and economic development. Focusing on public private partnerships in development cooperation, we examine different constellations of bridging agents and their effects in the formation of single CSDP projects and longer-term alliances. We conceptualize bridging agency as a collective process involving both internal partner representatives and external intermediaries in initiating and/or supporting roles. We find that the (...) involvement of external intermediaries eases the formation of single projects and longer-term alliances. However, when projects are initiated by external intermediaries they tend to be repetitive and narrow in scope, whereas projects initiated by internal partner representatives often explore novel agendas and embody a greater potential for social innovation. Yet, the longer-term pursuit of these agendas beyond single projects may require external intermediaries in supporting roles. Findings help better understand micro-processes and collective practices of brokerage and alliance formation in transnational governance contexts and beyond. (shrink)

Prelude -- What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought -- Introduction: Events of relation : concepts in the making -- Incipient action : the dance of the not-yet -- The elasticity of the almost -- A mover's guide to standing still -- Taking the next step -- Dancing the technogenetic body -- Perceptions in folding -- Grace taking form : Marey's movement machines -- Animation's dance -- From biopolitics to the biogram, or, how Leni Riefenstahl moves (...) through fascism -- Of force fields and rhythm contours -- Relationscapes : how contemporary Aboriginal art moves beyond the map -- Constituting facts : Dorothy Napangardi dances the dreaming -- Cornering a beginning -- Conclusion: Propositions for thought in motion. (shrink)

This study contributes to the growing interest in how hybrid organizations manage paradoxical social–business tensions. Our empirical case is “impact sourcing”—hybrids in global supply chains that hire staff from disadvantaged communities to provide services to business clients. We identify two major growth orientations—“community-focused” and “client-focused” growth—their inherent tensions and ways that hybrids manage them. The former favors slow growth and manages tensions through highly integrated client and community relations; the latter promotes faster growth and manages client and community relations separately. (...) Both growth orientations address social–business tensions in particular ways, but also create latent constraints that manifest when entrepreneurial aspirations conflict with the current growth path. In presenting and discussing our findings, we introduce preempting management practices of tensions, and the importance of geographic embeddedness and distance to the paradox literature. (shrink)

This paper argues that Donald Davidson’s infamous denial in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” that there is any such thing as a language, though it may not be fully supported by the arguments given for it in that paper, is nonetheless entailed by his semantic views generally, according to which the literal, linguistic meaning of a speaker’s words on an occasion is determined by how the speaker intended to be understood. In favor of this view, and thus against conventional languages, (...) the paper then argues that this understanding of linguistic meaning promises, in a way the conventional view of meaning does not, to make sense of linguistic normativity. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to compile a selection of the various formalisms found in conversation theory to introduce readers to Pask's discursive algebra. In this way, the text demonstrates how concept sharing and concept formation by means of the interaction of two participants may be formalized. The approach taken in this study is to examine the formal notation system used by Pask and demonstrate how such formalisms may be used to represent concept sharing and concept formation through conversation. (...) The compilation of the discursive algebra using the framework provided by conversation theory could potentially be used as an auxiliary framework to study conversational interactions in multi-agent systems theory. (shrink)

The legacy of classical antiquity -- War and peace in the medieval world -- Holy wars, crusades, and religious wars -- Humanism and Neo-Stoicism -- The search for a science of peace.

In the past decade, several Descartes scholars have gone on record claiming that, for biological purposes, Descartes likely accepts the practical scientific necessity of the existence of “physical natures,” even while his official substance-mode ontology and his characterization of matter in terms of extension do not license the existence of physical natures. In this article, I elaborate on the historical context of Descartes’s biology, the “practical scientific necessity” just mentioned, and argue, contrary to other interpretations, that Descartes does offer a (...) philosophical justification for the existence of physical natures, albeit not by appeal to the categories of substance and mode, or matter as such, but by appeal to our “nature” as a union between mind and body. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: One Model of Care Ethics An Overview of Care Ethics Care and Other Moral Perspectives Care and Bioethics Conclusion References Further reading.

The purpose of the following text is to give readers a general introduction to Gordon Pask’s conversation theory, which is considered here to be a cybernetic and epistemological account of concept-forming and concept-sharing through conversational discourse and practice. While Pask devoted three lengthy tomes to articulate the theory and its applications, I believe it is necessary to give readers who are interested in conversation theory a general introduction to what I believe are the key features of his work in this (...) area. I argue that conversation theory should be considered an inferential account of the theory of concepts rather than a representational account, by virtue of Pask’s argument that a concept must be a process that involves many other concepts. (shrink)