Studies have consistently shown that LGBTQ individuals are at increased risk for several mental and physical health challenges including suicidality. The relationship between religion and LGBTQ well-being in general and LGBTQ suicidality specifically has increasingly been the subject of scholarly investigation. This systematic review examines all peer-reviewed articles included in the EBSCO PsycInfo database since 2000 that examined the relationship between religiosity and LGBTQ suicide (50 studies in all). These studies reveal a complex relationship that is nuanced and, at times, (...) contradictory. Overall, 65% identified at least one religiosity-related predictor as a risk factor for LGBTQ suicidality, 41% identified at least one religiosity-related predictor as a protective factor against suicidality, while 53% found no associations between religiosity-related predictors and suicide risk. However, when specifically examining religious affiliation/denomination, salience, or beliefs and behaviors, typically, religiosity was either protective or unassociated with LGBTQ suicidality. This held particularly true for studies that had population-based samples, employed control variables and included comparison groups, thus enhancing their generalizability. The one religiosity-related predictor that was almost universally identified as a risk factor was when an individual felt conflicted between their religious and sexual-gender identities. (shrink)

While the rise of a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ was a longstanding concern for Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, some commentators have suggested that—for better or for worse—the challenge posed by relativism appears to be less of a priority for Pope Francis. Indeed, Francis's remark, ‘Who am I to judge?’ appears to have become as much the defining soundbite for his papacy as the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ was for Benedict's. Contrary to these perceptions, this article argues that a critique of relativism is (...) in fact a central aspect of Pope Francis's magisterium. Francis exhibits continuity with Benedict by amplifying his concerns about the danger of attempting to reconstruct reality according to human desire, but Francis also develops his predecessor's teaching by introducing the category of ‘practical relativism’. With this development, relativism cannot be dismissed as a theoretical problem that only plagues those who refuse to assent to the truth intellectually. The willingness to set aside the truth to which one assents when it proves inconvenient represents a more pernicious—precisely because more subtle—form of relativism that Francis argues must be rooted out, not by argument, but through self‐examination and the practice of solidarity. (shrink)

The implementation of the thoracoabdominal normothermic regional perfusion in organ donation after circulatory determination of death (TANRP-DCDD) protocol is garnering increasing attention and pre...

In this book, Michael Arbib, a researcher in artificial intelligence and brain theory, joins forces with Mary Hesse, a philosopher of science, to present an integrated account of how humans 'construct' reality through interaction with the social and physical world around them. The book is a major expansion of the Gifford Lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 1983. The authors reconcile a theory of the individual's construction of reality as a network (...) of schemas 'in the head' with an account of the social construction of language, science, ideology and religion to provide an integrated schema-theoretic view of human knowledge. The authors still find scope for lively debate, particularly in their discussion of free will and of the reality of God. The book integrates an accessible exposition of background information with a cumulative marshalling of evidence to address fundamental questions concerning human action in the world and the nature of ultimate reality. (shrink)

My essay, “Multi-modal argumentation” was published in the journal, _Philosophy of the Social Sciences,_ in 1994. This information appeared again in my book, _Coalescent argumentation_ in 1997. In the ensuing twenty years, there have been many changes in argumentation theory, and I would like to take this opportunity to examine my now middle-aged theory in light of the developments in our discipline. I will begin by relating how a once keen intended lawyer and then formal logician ended up in argumentation (...) theory. (If you do not care to read this bit of autobiography, skip to Section 2). (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

Burkart et al. present a paradox – general factors of intelligence exist among individual differences (g) in performance in several species, and also at the aggregate level (G); however, there is ambiguous evidence for the existence of g when analyzing data using a mixed approach, that is, when comparing individuals of different species using the same cognitive ability battery. Here, we present an empirical solution to this paradox.

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper (...) is the result of a collective writing process. (shrink)

Using relevant encyclicals issued over the last 100 years, the author extracts those principles that constitute the underpinnings of Catholic Social Teaching about the employment relationship and contemplates implications of their incorporation into human resource policy. Respect for worker dignity, for his or her family's economic security, and for the common good of society clearly emerge as the primary guidelines for responsible human resource management. Dovetailing these three Church mandates with the economic objectives of the firm could, in essence, alter (...) the firm's nature because profit motivations would be constrained by consideration for worker and societal welfare. Integration of Church teaching with current corporate goals should therefore impact greatly on a variety of human resource policies. (shrink)

Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (generativ...

The article analyzes the neural and functional grounding of language skills as well as their emergence in hominid evolution, hypothesizing stages leading from abilities known to exist in monkeys and apes and presumed to exist in our hominid ancestors right through to modern spoken and signed languages. The starting point is the observation that both premotor area F5 in monkeys and Broca's area in humans contain a “mirror system” active for both execution and observation of manual actions, and that F5 (...) and Broca's area are homologous brain regions. This grounded the mirror system hypothesis of Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) which offers the mirror system for grasping as a key neural “missing link” between the abilities of our nonhuman ancestors of 20 million years ago and modern human language, with manual gestures rather than a system for vocal communication providing the initial seed for this evolutionary process. The present article, however, goes “beyond the mirror” to offer hypotheses on evolutionary changes within and outside the mirror systems which may have occurred to equip Homo sapiens with a language-ready brain. Crucial to the early stages of this progression is the mirror system for grasping and its extension to permit imitation. Imitation is seen as evolving via a so-called simple system such as that found in chimpanzees (which allows imitation of complex “object-oriented” sequences but only as the result of extensive practice) to a so-called complex system found in humans (which allows rapid imitation even of complex sequences, under appropriate conditions) which supports pantomime. This is hypothesized to have provided the substrate for the development of protosign, a combinatorially open repertoire of manual gestures, which then provides the scaffolding for the emergence of protospeech (which thus owes little to nonhuman vocalizations), with protosign and protospeech then developing in an expanding spiral. It is argued that these stages involve biological evolution of both brain and body. By contrast, it is argued that the progression from protosign and protospeech to languages with full-blown syntax and compositional semantics was a historical phenomenon in the development of Homo sapiens, involving few if any further biological changes. Key Words: gestures; hominids; language evolution; mirror system; neurolinguistics; primates; protolanguage; sign language; speech; vocalization. (shrink)

Michael A. Petersa and Fazal Rizvib aBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China; bMelbourne University, Melbourne, Australia Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘no...

The psychology of belief in the paranormal has often been used to stigmatize believers but it has also been used with a more open-minded approach. This paper describes some research of this kind in which believers were found to report more mystical experience, have more creative personalities, report more manic and depressive experience, and more magical ideation, unwittingly suggesting a link with bipolar disorder and schizotypal personality. In addition, however, these six variables were all found to correlate positively and significantly (...) with each other. The positive manifold suggested a single underlying factor, which indeed emerged from principal components analysis. It was speculated that the underlying factor was “transliminality”—a gating mechanism modulating the flow of information and affect from subliminal levels into supraliminal. Later studies have not as clearly confirmed the existence of the positive manifold but nevertheless the concept of transliminality may be a useful one for understanding paranormal experience and hence paranormal belief. (shrink)

This article was conceived as a sequel to “The Humean Theory of Motivation.” The paper addresses various challenges to the standard account of the explanation of intentional action in terms of desire and means-end belief, challenges that didn’t occur to me when I wrote “The Humean Theory of Motivation.” I begin by suggesting that the attraction of the standard account lies in the way in which it allows us to unify a vast array of otherwise diverse types of action explanation. (...) I go on to consider a range of other challenges to the standard account of the explanation of action: Rosalind Hursthouse’s challenge based on the possibility of what she calls “arational” actions (Hursthouse 1991); Michael Stocker’s challenge based on the idea that some explanations of action are nonteleological (Stocker 1981); Mark Platts’s challenge based on the idea that our evaluative beliefs can sometimes explain our actions all by themselves (Platts 1981); a voluntarist challenge based on the possibility of explaining actions by the exercise of self-control; and a challenge from Jonathan Dancy based on the idea that reasons can themselves sometimes explain actions all by themselves (Dancy 1994). (shrink)