In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts.

How are Christians to live in such difficult times? Unique of all people, Christians are called to embrace a hopeful outlook on life. "Mere Hope" offers the core, Christ-centered perspective that all Christians share, and that Christians alone have to offer to a world filled with frustrations, pain, and disappointment. For those in darkness, dispair, and discouragement, for those in the midst of trials, suffering, and injustice, mere hope lives. The spirit of the age of cynicism. When our leaders, our (...) families, and our friends let us down at every turn, this ins't surprising. But we need another perspective; we need hope. Rather than reflecting resigned despair or distracted indifference, author Jason Duesing argues, our lives ought to be shaped by the gospel of Jesus -- a gospel of hope. (shrink)

The Chacoan road system is an understudied aspect of a very unique culture in New Mexico. The extensive roads present important evidence to the social structure of the Chaco people. A few theories have been presented about the reason for the roads, such as economic, administrative and religion. This paper argues that the roads were used for military purposes, because the roads provided quick access to all satellite townships in the region.

Dialectic, as commonly approached, is not an analytic study, as the notion is defined in the paper. Where it is analytically approached, the result is pragmatic in nature, as well as syntactic and semantic. This paper lays the foundations of a purely formal analysis of conversations. This study is accordingly called "Conversation Theory". The key notions of "conversation", "dialogue", "conversation game", "rules of response", "epistemic community" and "channel of informations" are defined precisely, and an analysis of how these notions fit (...) together is given. Particular attention is given to distinguishing conversation theory from standard logic. The paper concludes by analysing a few sample conversation-games, indicating areas needing further research, by pointing out the simplification inherent in the sample games. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on Ayn Rand's characteristic approach to metaphysical concepts and principles. It first concerns the axioms of existence and identity, their respective concepts, and then their validation and cognitive roles. The chapter also considers Rand's view of entities and causation. Next, it describes consciousness, and its dependence on existence (i.e., the primacy of existence). The chapter then discusses Rand's view of free will (a fundamental feature of human consciousness) and the related distinction Rand draws between metaphysically given and (...) man‐made facts. Just as free will is a case of causality, so too is it a case of identity. Rand's endorsement of self‐created character and free will is not an endorsement of the existentialist positions that human nature or identity is contrary to or negated by choice. The chapter concludes by describing the relationship between the primacy of existence and Rand's conception of objectivity. (shrink)

Aims: To describe individuals’ perceptions of the activities that take place within the cancer genetics clinic, the relationships between these activities and how these relationships are sustained. Design: Qualitative interview study. Participants: Forty individuals involved in carrying out cancer genetics research in either a clinical (n = 28) or research-only (n = 12) capacity in the UK. Findings: Interviewees perceive research and clinical practice in the subspecialty of cancer genetics as interdependent. The boundary between research and clinical practice is described (...) as vague or blurred, and this ambiguity is regarded as being sustained by a range of methodological, ethical and economic factors. The implications of these findings for the “therapeutic misconception” are explored. It is argued that while research participation is seen as having therapeutic benefit for individual patients, the interviewees are not labouring under any misconceptions about the relationship between research and clinical care. It is suggested that concepts such as the “therapeutic misconception” may have less relevance in highly technological specialities that are characterised by a developing evidence base. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Taste metaphors provide a rich vocabulary for describing emotional experience, potentially serving as an adaptive mechanism for conveying abstract emotional concepts using concrete verbal references to our shared experience. We theorized that the popularity of these expressions results from the close association with hedonic valence shared by these two domains of experience. To explore the possibility that this affective quality underlies the semantic similarity of these domains, we used a behavioral “odd-one-out” task in an online (...) sample of 1059 participants in order to examine the semantic similarity of concepts related to emotion, taste, and color, another rich source of sensory metaphors. We found that the semantic similarity of emotion and taste concepts was greater than that of emotion and color concepts. Importantly, the similarity of taste and emotion concepts was strongly related to their similarity in hedonic valence, a relationship which was also significantly greater than that present between color and emotion. These results suggest that the common core of valence between taste and emotion concepts allows us to bridge the conceptual divide between our shared sensory environment and our internal emotional experience. (shrink)

The chapters, written by leading experts on American philosophy, reexamine Josiah Royce's work as a resource for contemporary thought. Themes include: metaphysics, phenomenology, logic; problems of individualism, loyalty, and community; practical matters of race, religious faith, and feminist epistemology, and Royce's place in the history of philosophy.

1. It is noteworthy that scholarly interest in the history of the period leading up to the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (henceforward the 1870 Act) and its aftermath, particularly its religious...

Experts identified water quality, manure, good handling practices (including personal hygiene and equipment sanitation), and traceability as critical farm problem areas that, if addressed, are likely to decrease risk associated with microbial contamination of fresh produce from all scales of agriculture. However, the diverse nature of production strategies used by produce farmers presents multiple options for addressing foodborne illness issues while simultaneously creating potential complications. We use a mental models methodology to enhance our understanding of the underlying factors and assumptions (...) of small, medium, and large produce growers that influence their decision-making processes for contamination prevention and control. This empirical evidence demonstrates how challenges and opportunities to food safety are related to the scale of production and marketing strategies. We believe that refining the development of standards and existing extension and outreach food safety programs are important to both consumer protection and supporting agricultural communities. Additionally, this approach will help develop and refine food safety programs that will result in empirically grounded recommendations based on identified grower information needs. (shrink)

We explore three questions about Earth system modeling that are of both scientific and philosophical interest: What kind of understanding can be gained via complex Earth system models? How can the limits of understanding be bypassed or managed? How should the task of evaluating Earth system models be conceptualized?

The Gnostic World is an outstanding guide to Gnosticism, designed as a collection of critical studies by experts to both widen and deepen study in Gnostic movements and strands of speculation as a discrete "World" of human socio-spiritual life from the distant past until today. An international team of contributors examines these manifestations in a variety of contexts, from the ancient pre-Christian to the contemporary. The volume considers the intersection of Gnosticism with Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Indic practices and beliefs, (...) and also with such new religious movements as Theosophy, Scientology, Western Sufism, and the Nation of Islam. This illustrated handbook will be an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and researchers of Gnostic doctrine and history. (shrink)

Sexual reproduction is a composite, not a singular, phenomenon and as such can be subdivided into a number of componentsi.e. fusion, recombination, fission, and the male-female phenomenon. These components can evolve independently, though any evolutionary change in one component is likely to influence the future evolution of the other components. The ambiguity that surrounds the term ‘sex’ due to a failure to recognise the composite nature of sexual reproduction has led to considerable confusion in past discussions of the evolution of (...) the phenomenon. This paper considers the possible chronological interaction of the components of sexual reproduction both with each other and with the sequence of selective pressures that seem likely to have acted. This chronological approach is used to consider: the origin of sexual reproduction; the evolution of sexual reproduction in the common ancestor of the procaryotes and eucaryotes; the modification of the ancestral system in the procaryote line following the procaryote-eucaryote dichotomy; and the modification of the ancestral system in the eucaryote line up to the origin of the male-female phenomenon.It is suggested that the fusion and recombination of the first living organisms were chronological continuations of the fusion and recombination of complex organic molecules that led up to the origin of life. The evolution of the third major component of sexual reproductioni.e. fission , by definition coincided with the origin of life. Initial selection on the components of sexual reproduction are likely to have been related to the optimum manifestations of size, complexity, diversity, multiplication, and distribution. Resultant early evolutionary trends are likely to have been: selective fusion between more-similar organisms; increase in number of fissions per fusion; and less recombination.The procaryote-eucaryote dichotomy is argued to have evolved in response to the increasing cellular problems of packing and replicating an increasing amount of hereditary material. The evolution of a single circular hereditary organelle in the procaryote line is argued to have led to the loss of total fusion and the specialisation of individuals into either donors or recipients. The donor-recipient phenomenon of procaryotes is directly analogous to the male-female phenomenon of eucaryotes and leads to parallel evolution due to sexual selection in both groups. In the eucaryote line the ancestral mechanism of sexual reproduction is argued to have persisted through, but to have been greatly modified by, the evolution of complex machinery for the handling of multiple hereditary organelles at cell division and reduction division. The evolutionary modification of the ancestral system of sexual reproduction is suggested to have led in eucaryotes to the evolution of: the species phenomenon; allelic recombination; and the male-female phenomenon. (shrink)

Community research by anthropologists and sociologists details the effects that centralization of decision making has on local communities. As governance and regulation move toward global scales, conservation policy has devolved to the local levels, creating tensions in resource management and protection. Centralization without local participation can place communities at risk by eroding the environmental knowledge and decision making capacity of local people. Environmental problems such as water quality impairments require perception, interpretation, and ability to act locally. Through a presentation of (...) findings from farm communities in the Sugar Creek Watershed (Northeast Ohio, USA), this paper examines tradition, social scale, and land use among Anabaptist and other farm households, and refocuses on-farm conversation away from conventional individual metric-based studies and toward a systems approach. This new approach frames conservation behavior in a socio-cultural system that is influenced by tradition in on-farm decision making. Data from four subwatersheds are used to probe the effects of these variables on conservation adoption, explore the optimal farm size concept, and discus the roles of tradition and local and non-local knowledge in sustainability. (shrink)

Virtues, broadly understood as stable and robust dispositions for certain responses across morally relevant situations, have been a growing topic of interest in psychology. A central topic of discussion has been whether studies showing that situations can strongly influence our responses provide evidence against the existence of virtues (as a kind of stable and robust disposition). In this review, we examine reasons for thinking that the prevailing methods for examining situational influences are limited in their ability to test dispositional stability (...) and robustness; or, then, whether virtues exist. We make the case that these limitations can be addressed by aggregating repeated, cross-situational assessments of environmental, psychological and physiological variables within everyday life—a form of assessment often called ecological momentary assessment (EMA, or experience sampling). We, then, examine how advances in smartphone application (app) technology, and their mass adoption, make these mobile devices an unprecedented vehicle for EMA and, thus, the psychological study of virtue. We, additionally, examine how smartphones might be used for virtue development by promoting changes in thought and behavior within daily life; a technique often called ecological momentary intervention (EMI). While EMA/I have become widely employed since the 1980s for the purposes of understanding and promoting change amongst clinical populations, few EMA/I studies have been devoted to understanding or promoting virtues within non-clinical populations. Further, most EMA/I studies have relied on journaling, PDAs, phone calls and/or text messaging systems. We explore how smartphone app technology provides a means of making EMA a more robust psychological method, EMI a more robust way of promoting positive change, and, as a result, opens up new possibilities for studying and promoting virtues. (shrink)

The relationship between religiosity and ethical behavior at work has remained elusive. In fact, inconsistent results in observed magnitudes and direction led Hood et al. (The psychology of religion: An empirical approach, 1996 ) to describe the relationship between religiosity and ethics as “something of a roller coaster ride.” Weaver and Agle (Acad Manage Rev 27(1):77–97, 2002 ) utilizing social structural versions of symbolic interactionism theory reasoned that we should not expect religion to affect ethical outcomes for all religious individuals; (...) rather, such a relationship likely depends on specific religious attitudes including religious motivation orientation (intrinsic RMO vs. extrinsic RMO), perceived sacred qualities of work (job sanctification), and views of God (VOG, loving vs. punishing). We examined the effects of these three religious attitudes on participants’ judgments of 29 ethically questionable vignettes. Consistent with symbolic interactionism theory, intrinsic RMO and having a loving view of God were both negatively related to endorsing ethically questionable vignettes, whereas extrinsic RMO was positively related to endorsing the vignettes. Unexpectedly, job sanctification was positively related to endorsing the vignettes. However, both intrinsic and extrinsic RMO moderated this relationship such that sanctifying one’s job was related to ethical judgments only for those who were: (a) low in intrinsic RMO or (b) high in extrinsic RMO. We reasoned based on symbolic interactionism theory that intrinsically motivated participants, in contrast to extrinsically motivated participants, may have utilized their religious beliefs as a guiding framework in making ethical judgments. (shrink)

The brain is an ever‐changing organ that encodes memories and directs behavior. Neuroanatomical studies have revealed structural plasticity of neural architecture, and advances in gene expression technology and epigenetics have demonstrated new mechanisms underlying the brain's dynamic nature. Stressful experiences challenge the plasticity of the brain, and prolonged exposure to environmental stress redefines the normative transcriptional profile of both neurons and glia, and can lead to the onset of mental illness. A more thorough understanding of normal and abnormal gene expression (...) is needed to define the diseased brain and improve current treatments for psychiatric disorders. The efforts to describe gene expression networks have been bolstered by microarray and RNA‐sequencing technologies. The heterogeneity of neural cell populations and their unique microenvironments, coupled with broad ranging interconnectivity, makes resolving this complexity exceedingly challenging and requires the combined efforts of single cell and systems level expression profiling to identify targets for therapeutic intervention. (shrink)

Philosophers often suggest that their theories of free will are supported by our phenomenology. Just as their theories conflict, their descriptions of the phenomenology of free will often conflict as well. We suggest that this should motivate an effort to study the phenomenology of free will in a more systematic way that goes beyond merely the introspective reports of the philosophers themselves. After presenting three disputes about the phenomenology of free will, we survey the (limited) psychological research on the experiences (...) relevant to the philosophical debates and then describe some pilot studies of our own with the aim of encouraging further research. The data seem to support compatibilist descriptions of the phenomenology more than libertarian descriptions. We conclude that the burden is on libertarians to find empirical support for their more demanding metaphysical theories with their more controversial phenomenological claims. (shrink)

The authors focus on four major thematic areas – the reform of church, the reform of theology, the reform of perspective, and the reform of method – which together encompasses the breadth and depth of Cusanus’ own reform initiatives.