Parents and Provider Perspectives on the Return of Genomic Findings for Cleft Families in Africa.Abimbola M. Oladayo,SydneyProchaska,Tamara Busch,Wasiu L. Adeyemo,Lord J. J. Gowans,Mekonen Eshete,Waheed Awotoye,Veronica Sule,Azeez Alade,Adebowale A. Adeyemo,Peter A. Mossey,Anya Prince,Jeffrey C. Murray &Azeez Butali -2024 -AJOB Empirical Bioethics 15 (2):133-146.detailsBackground Inadequate knowledge among health care providers (HCPs) and parents of affected children limits the understanding and utility of secondary genetic findings (SFs) in under-represented populations in genomics research. SFs arise from deep DNA sequencing done for research or diagnostic purposes and may burden patients and their families despite their potential health importance. This study aims to evaluate the perspective of both groups regarding SFs and their choices in the return of results from genetic testing in the context of orofacial (...) clefts.Methods Using an online survey, we evaluated the experiences of 252 HCPs and 197 parents across participating cleft clinics in Ghana and Nigeria toward the return of SFs across several domains.Results Only 1.6% of the HCPs felt they had an expert understanding of when and how to incorporate genomic medicine into practice, while 50.0% agreed that all SFs should be returned to patients. About 95.4% of parents were willing to receive all the information from genetic testing (including SFs), while the majority cited physicians as their primary information source (64%).Conclusions Overall, parents and providers were aware that genetic testing could help in the clinical management of diseases. However, they cited a lack of knowledge about genomic medicine, uncertain clinical utility, and lack of available learning resources as barriers. The knowledge gained from this study will assist with developing guidelines and policies to guide providers on the return of SFs in sub-Saharan Africa and across the continent. (shrink)
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Interview withSydney Brenner. The world of genome projects.Sydney Brenner -1996 -Bioessays 18 (12):1039-1042.detailsDrSydney Brenner has played a major, and unique, role in biology during the past 40 years. His contributions have ranged from key work on the structure of the genetic code and the existence of mRNA through the development of Caenorhabditis elegans as a key model system in developmental biology to genomic analysis and function in vertebrates. BioEssays went to interview Dr Brenner at his home in the cathedral city of Ely, England, on the significance of the genome projects (...) for human biology, in particular, and for biology, in general. (shrink)
I–Sydney Shoemaker: Self, Body, and Coincidence.Sydney Shoemaker -1999 -Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73 (1):287-306.detailsA major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the properties ascribed by (...) these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. (shrink)
The First Person Perspective and Other Essays.Sydney Shoemaker -1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press.detailsSydney Shoemaker is one of the most influential philosophers currently writing on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. The essays in this collection deal with the way in which we know our own minds, and with the nature of those mental states of which we have our most direct conscious awareness. Professor Shoemaker opposes the 'inner sense' conception of introspective self-knowledge. He defends the view that perceptual and sensory states have non-representational features - 'qualia' - that determine what it is (...) like to have them. Amongst the other topics covered are the unity of consciousness, and the idea that the 'first-person perspective' gives a privileged route to philosophical understanding of the nature of mind. This major collection is sure to prove invaluable to all advanced students of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)
(2 other versions)Realization and Mental Causation.Sydney Shoemaker -2000 -The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 9:23-33.detailsA common conception of what it is for one property to “realize” another suggests that it is the realizer property that does the causal work, and that the realized property is epiphenomenal. The same conception underlies George Bealer’s argument that functionalism leads to the absurd conclusion that what we take to be self-ascriptions of a mental state are really self-ascriptions of “first-order” properties that realize that state. This paper argues for a different concept of realization. A property realizes another if (...) its “forward looking” causal features are a subset of those of the property realized. The instantiation of the realizer property will include the instantiation of the property realized; and when the effects produced are due to the causal features of the latter, it is the instantiation of it that is appropriately regarded as their cause. Epiphenomenalism is avoided, and so is Bealer’s absurd conclusion. (shrink)
Free and Rational: Suárez on the Will.Sydney Penner -2013 -Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 95 (1):1-35.detailsDespite the importance of Suárez’s defense of the freedom of the will at the threshold of early modern philosophy, his account has received scant recent attention. This paper aims partially to redress that neglect. Suárez’s position can be understood as a balancing act between desiring to attribute libertarian freedom to agents and desiring to maintain the will’s status as a rational appetite. Hence, he rejects an intellectualism that says that choices are necessitated by the intellect’s judgements (since he does not (...) think that the judgements themselves can be directly free), but affirms that only what is judged good can be chosen. (shrink)
Self and body.Sydney Shoemaker -1999 -The Philosophers' Magazine 8 (8):29-29.details[Sydney Shoemaker] A major objection to the view that the relation of persons to human animals is coincidence rather than identity is that on this view the human animal will share the coincident person's physical properties, and so should (contrary to the view) share its mental properties. But while the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the difference in the persistence conditions of these entities implies that there will be a difference in the (...) properties ascribed by these predicates, with the result that the physical properties that determine the person's mental states will belong to the person and not to the human animal. /// [Galen Strawson] What are the grounds of self-consciousness? I consider 29 proposals and reject 22, including a number of proposals that experience of body (or bodies) is necessary for self-consciousness. A popular strategy in debates of this sort is to argue that one cannot be said to have some concept C (e.g. the concept ONESELF, necessary for self-consciousness) unless one has a need or a use for C given the character of one's experience considered independently of the character that it has given that one possesses C. I suggest that such arguments are invalid. (shrink)
Physical Realization.Sydney Shoemaker -2007 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.detailsIn Physical Realization,Sydney Shoemaker considers the question of how physicalism can be true: how can all facts about the world, including mental ones, be constituted by facts about the distribution in the world of physical properties? Physicalism requires that the mental properties of a person are 'realized in' the physical properties of that person, and that all instantiations of properties in macroscopic objects are realized in microphysical states of affairs. Shoemaker offers an account of both these sorts of (...) realization, one which allows the realized properties to be causally efficacious. He also explores the implications of this account for a wide range of metaphysical issues, including the nature of persistence through time, the problem of material constitution, the possibility of emergent properties, and the nature of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)
Diversity in IRB Membership: Views of IRB Chairpersons at U.S. Universities and Academic Medical Centers.Sydney Churchill,Emily A. Largent,Elizabeth Taggert &Holly Fernandez Lynch -2022 -AJOB Empirical Bioethics 13 (4):237-250.detailsBackground Diversity in Institutional Review Board (IRB) membership is important for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons, including fairness, promoting trust, improving decision quality, and responding to systemic racism. Yet U.S. IRBs remain racially and ethnically homogeneous, even as gender diversity has improved. Little is known about IRB chairpersons’ perspectives on membership diversity and barriers to increasing it, as well as current institutional efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within IRB membership.Methods We surveyed IRB chairpersons leading U.S. boards registered (...) with the Office for Human Research Protections. Here, we focus exclusively on responses from a subset of 388 chairpersons of IRBs at universities and academic medical centers (AMCs).Results Board chairs were predominantly white and evenly split between men and women. Only about half reported that their boards had at least one member who is Black or African American (51%), Asian (56%), or Hispanic (48%), with 85% of university/AMC boards comprised entirely (15%) or mostly (70%) of white members. Most IRB chairpersons (64%) reported satisfaction with the current diversity of their membership. Participants largely agreed that considering diversity in the selection of IRB members is important (91%), including to improve the quality of IRB deliberation (80%), with an emphasis on racial/ethnic (85%) and gender diversity (74%). Most participants (80%) reported some type of active DEI effort regarding board membership at their university/AMC and just over half (57%) expressed satisfaction with these efforts.Conclusions Our national survey found that although university/AMC IRB chairpersons report valuing diversity in board membership, it may be lacking in key areas. Going forward, it will be important to specify clear reasons for diversity in the IRB context, as well to establish targets for acceptable levels of board diversity and to match DEI efforts to those targets. (shrink)
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The Ethics of Adultcentrism in the Context of COVID-19: Whose Voice Matters?Sydney Campbell -2021 -Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 18 (4):569-572.detailsAdultcentrism is an inherent feature of the social fabrics comprising most resource-rich countries in the twenty-first century that undermines the capacities, value, and voices of young people in various ways. In the context of COVID-19, we are confronted with the question of whose voice matters and must ask: is adultcentrism ethically permissible during a pandemic? This Critical Controversy examines this question in relation to evolving concepts of childhood, children’s rights, and the capacities of young people, to highlight areas of tension, (...) future research, and potential for critical dialogue. (shrink)
Sellars’s Via Media.Sydney Pressman -1982 -The Monist 65 (3):393-405.detailsSellars’s critics sometimes contend that his proposed via media between Cartesian mentalism and logical behaviorism entials a correlative via media between a mentalist and a behaviorist analysis of meaning. They then argue that mentalism and behaviorism about meaning are exhaustive alternatives and any attempt to spell out a third semantic view fails. Hence, Sellars’s via media also fails. Sellars tries to avoid this line of argument by maintaining that meaning is not an analyzable concept, that is, it cannot be defined (...) in terms of mentalistic or behavioristic facts; nevertheless meaning can be explicated. Thus, no philosophy of mind will entail an analysis of meaning, although one can indeed be compatible with an explication of meaning and this is true of his “third way.” Commentators such as Chisholm and Young respond to this move by arguing that Sellars’s theory of meaning is successful only if it smuggles in a mentalist analysis of meaning and hence, Sellars’s revisionist semantics fail along with his revisionist philosophy of mind. (shrink)
Elementary Sketches Of Moral Philosophy: Delivered At The Royal Institution, In The Years 1804, 1805, And 1806.Sydney Smith -2019 - Wentworth Press.detailsThis 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)
Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition.Sydney Levine,Nick Chater,Joshua B. Tenenbaum &Fiery Cushman -forthcoming -Behavioral and Brain Sciences:1-38.detailsIt is widely agreed upon that morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit. We therefore might expect numerous proposals for organizing human moral cognition around the logic of bargaining, negotiation, and agreement. Yet, while “contractualist” ideas play an important role in moral philosophy, they are starkly underrepresented in the field of moral psychology. From a contractualist perspective, ideal moral judgments are those that would be agreed to by rational bargaining agents—an idea with wide-spread support in philosophy, (...) psychology, economics, biology, and cultural evolution. As a practical matter, however, investing time and effort in negotiating every interpersonal interaction is unfeasible. Instead, we propose, people use abstractions and heuristics to efficiently identify mutually beneficial arrangements. We argue that many well-studied elements of our moral minds, such as reasoning about others’ utilities (“consequentialist” reasoning) or evaluating intrinsic ethical properties of certain actions (“deontological” reasoning), can be naturally understood as resource-rational approximations of a contractualist ideal. Moreover, this view explains the flexibility of our moral minds—how our moral rules and standards get created, updated and overridden and how we deal with novel cases we have never seen before. Thus, the apparently fragmentary nature of our moral psychology—commonly described in terms of systems in conflict—can be largely unified around the principle of finding mutually beneficial agreements under resource constraint. Our resulting “triple theory” of moral cognition naturally integrates contractualist, consequentialist and deontological concerns. (shrink)
A Second Honeymoon: Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics.Sydney Faught -2019 -Journal of Animal Ethics 9 (1):39-46.detailsIn “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce,” Mark Sagoff asserts that “environmentalists cannot be animal liberationists. Animal liberationists cannot be environmentalists”. In this article, I explore and refute this claim. As a result of structuring his argument around the work of Peter Singer and Aldo Leopold, I argue Sagoff too quickly dismisses rights-based approaches to animal liberation. Drawing on Thomas Pogge’s institutional framework for human rights, I present a rights-based foundation upon which animal liberationism and environmentalism can (...) be based compatibly. (shrink)
Is EBM an Appropriate Model for Research into the Effectiveness of Psychotherapy?Sydney Katherine Hovda -2019 -Topoi 38 (2):401-409.detailsEBM, and the hierarchy of evidence it prescribes, is a controversial model when it comes to research into the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic treatments. This is due in part to the so-called ‘Dodo Bird verdict’, which claims that all psychotherapies are equally effective, and that their effectiveness is largely due to the placebo effect. In response to this controversy, I argue that EBM can nevertheless be made to fit research into the effectiveness of psychotherapy, once a piecemeal approach to conducting RCTs (...) is taken. Such an approach involves studying the contributions made by individual treatment components. (shrink)
Making Use of the Testimonies: Suárez and Grotius on Natural Law.Sydney Penner -2020 -Grotiana 41 (1):108-136.detailsThanks to Barbeyrac, Pufendorf and others, there is a long-familiar picture of Grotius as offering a groundbreaking account of natural law. By now there is also a familiar observation that there is no agreement what makes Grotius’s account innovative. Sometimes this leads to skepticism about how innovative Grotius’s account of natural law really is. Some scholars suggest that Grotius’s account of natural law resembles Suárez’s account. But others continue to argue that Barbeyrac is right to see Grotius as breaking the (...) ice of previous philosophy and laying the groundwork for a distinctively modern moral philosophy. I plan to contribute to the debate by arguing that, properly understood, Grotius’s position is similar to Suárez’s on a range of fundamental questions, and, furthermore, that seeing Grotius as making a radical break with the past violates his own self-conception. 1. (shrink)
The Mental Representation of Human Action.Sydney Levine,Alan M. Leslie &John Mikhail -2018 -Cognitive Science 42 (4):1229-1264.detailsVarious theories of moral cognition posit that moral intuitions can be understood as the output of a computational process performed over structured mental representations of human action. We propose that action plan diagrams—“act trees”—can be a useful tool for theorists to succinctly and clearly present their hypotheses about the information contained in these representations. We then develop a methodology for using a series of linguistic probes to test the theories embodied in the act trees. In Study 1, we validate the (...) method by testing a specific hypothesis (diagrammed by act trees) about how subjects are representing two classic moral dilemmas and finding that the data support the hypothesis. In Studies 2–4, we explore possible explanations for discrete and surprising findings that our hypothesis did not predict. In Study 5, we apply the method to a less well‐studied case and show how new experiments generated by our method can be used to settle debates about how actions are mentally represented. In Study 6, we argue that our method captures the mental representation of human action better than an alternative approach. A brief conclusion suggests that act trees can be profitably used in various fields interested in complex representations of human action, including law, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and artificial intelligence. (shrink)
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Theology in America: The Major Protestant Voices From Puritanism to Neo-Orthodoxy.Sydney E. Ahlstrom (ed.) -2003 - Hackett Publishing Company.detailsCovering nearly 300 years of American religious writing, this anthology compiles selections from thirteen notable thinkers--including Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah Royce, William James and H. Richard Niebuhr--to reveal the vital and creative history of Protestant theology in America. In his substantial Introduction,Sydney Ahlstrom relates the history of American theology in broad and accessible terms, tackling his subject with characteristic clarity, passion, and intellectual rectitude.
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Some Formulae for Aesthetic Analysis.Sydney C. Rome -1954 -Review of Metaphysics 8 (2):357 - 365.detailsAnother sort of thing resembles works of art in combining existence, message and a kind of presentation, namely, symbols. Hence it seems reasonable to take works of art as symbols. And yet works of art are a special kind of symbol, because in them presentation has a double function. All symbols directly present their meaning; indeed the essential function of symbols is to serve as vehicles for conveying us into the immediate presence of what they mean. But works of art (...) have a second presentational mode of functioning. They also present themselves; and this is true both for abstract and for representational art. (shrink)
The Homer We Always Knew: Reflections on an Open Secret.AustraliaSydney -2024 -The European Legacy 30 (2):222-228.detailsVolume 30, Issue 2, March 2025, Page 222-228.
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Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays.Sydney Shoemaker -1984 - New York: Oxford University Press UK.detailsSince the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity,Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation between (...) the two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)
Suárez, Francisco.Sydney Penner -2015 -Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.detailsFrancisco Suárez Sometimes called the "Eminent Doctor" after Paul V’s designation of him as doctor eximius et pius, Francisco Suárez was the leading theological and philosophical light of Spain’s Golden Age, alongside such cultural icons as Miguel de Cervantes, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and El Greco. Although initially rejected on grounds of deficient health … Continue reading Suárez, Francisco →.
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