In Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Roy Rappaport misses an opportunity to more tightly theorize the synergistic relationship between concepts of the divine, the psyches of ritual participants, and the adaptive dynamics of religious sociality. This paper proposes such a theory by drawing on implicit features of Rappaport’s account, fulfilling his goal of a “cybernetics of the holy.” I argue that concepts of the divine, when made authoritative for participants through ritual, have three important effects: they invite intense and meaningful reconstructions of personal identity according to paradigmatic examples; they act as a form of encoded social memory by organizing human relationship according to a “spiritual map”; and they provide the cognitive framework that make religious community organization robust, adaptive, and reproductive. We can characterize divine concepts as “specified absences” that ground each of these effects and link them together in a mutually-reinforcing set.

The conscientious are morally conflicted when their moral dilemmas or incommensurabilities, real or apparent, have not been resolved. But such doublemindedness need not lead to ethical disintegration or moral insensitivity. For one may develop the moral virtue of doublemindedness, the settled power to deliberate and act well while morally conflicted. Such action will be accompanied by both moral loss (perhaps 'dirty hands') and ethical gain (salubrious agental stability). In explaining the virtue's moral psychology I show, among other things, its consistency with wholeheartedness and the unity of the virtues. To broaden its claim to recognition, I show the virtue's consistency with diverse models of practical reason. In conclusion, Michael Walzer's interpretation of Hamlet's attitude toward Gertrude exemplifies this virtue in a fragmentary but nonetheless praiseworthy form.

Rice is an essential crop in Ghana. Several aspects of rice have been studied to increase its production; however, the environmental aspects, including impact on climate change, have not been studied well. There is therefore a gap in knowledge, and hence the need for continuous research. By accessing academic portals, such as Springer Open, InTech Open, Elsevier, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology’s offline campus library, 61 academic publications including peer reviewed journals, books, working papers, reports, etc. were critically reviewed. It was found that there is a lack of data on how paddy rice production systems affect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly emissions estimation, geographical location, and crops. Regarding GHG emission estimation, the review identified the use of emission factors calibrated using temperate conditions which do not suit tropical conditions. On location, most research on rice GHG emissions have been carried out in Asia with little input from Africa. In regard to crops, there is paucity of in-situ emissions data from paddy fields in Ghana. Drawing on the review, a conceptual framework is developed using Ghana as reference point to guide the discussion on fertilizer application, water management rice cultivars, and soil for future development of adaptation strategies for rice emission reduction.

Transdisciplinary research practice has become a core element of global sustainability science. Transdisciplinary research brings with it an expectation that people with different backgrounds and interests will learn together through collective problem solving and innovation. Here we introduce the concept of “transdisciplinary communities of practice, ” and draw on both situated learning theory and transdisciplinary practice to identify three key lessons for people working in, managing, or funding such groups. (1) Opportunities need to be purposefully created for outsiders to observe activities in the core group. (2) Communities of practice cannot be artificially created, but they can be nurtured. (3) Power matters in transdisciplinary communities of practice. These insights challenge thinking about how groups of people come together in pursuit of transdisciplinary outcomes, and call for greater attention to be paid to the social processes of learning that are at the heart of our aspirations for global sustainability science.

Foodways have been a component of archaeological research for decades. However, cooking and food preparation, as specific acts that could reveal social information about life beyond the kitchen, only became a focus of archaeological inquiry more recently. A review of the literature on cooking and food preparation reveals a shift from previous studies on subsistence strategies, consumption, and feasting. The new research is different because of the social questions that are asked, the change in focus to preparation and production rather than consumption, and the interest in highlighting marginalized people and their daily experiences. The theoretical perspectives the literature addresses revolve around practice, agency, and gender. As a result, this new focus of archaeological research on cooking and preparing food is grounded in anthropology.

Scholarly communication is at an unprecedented turning point created in part by the increasing saliency of data stewardship and data sharing. Formal data management plans represent a new emphasis in research, enabling access to data at higher volumes and more quickly, and the potential for replication and augmentation of existing research. Data sharing has recently transformed the practice, scope, content, and applicability of research in several disciplines, in particular in relation to spatially specific data. This lends exciting potentiality, but the most effective ways in which to implement such changes, particularly for disciplines involving human subjects and other sensitive information, demand consideration. Data management plans, stewardship, and sharing, impart distinctive technical, sociological, and ethical challenges that remain to be adequately identified and remedied. Here, we consider these and propose potential solutions for their amelioration.

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is an intrinsic state of the world. While early forms were advanced by Spinoza and Russell, only recently has panpsychism gained widespread academic consideration. In this paper, I will argue for panpsychism, based on a similarity of the nature of our consciousness with the nature of the parts of our consciousness. This argument will be motivated by an anti-strong emergentist viewpoint, while allowing for complex consciousness to arise from a form of weak emergence between fundamental parts. Ultimately, this argument demonstrates that an identity theorist would collapse to panpsychism or strong emergentism, the former being preferred. From this, I argue that panpsychists can gain some intuitive benefits of dualism and materialism, without inheriting their issues. This positions the panpsychist well to respond to issues like Jackson’s (1982) Mary-argument. I will then discuss possible objections to panpsychism, focusing primarily on the combination problem. I conclude that the co-consciousness strategy is the optimal solution to this problem and can account for the inverse issue of the decombination problem that cosmopsychism faces. Overall, panpsychism’s explanatory power and compatibility with other disciplines makes it a favorable theory within the philosophy of mind.