Categorizing Metatheologies

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-45
Author(s):  
Jonathan L. Kvanvig

The approaches I am focusing on are representatives in a category scheme derived from the twentieth century concern that led to the rise of metaethics, a concern over what to make of the different kinds of declarative sentences in natural language. Some such sentences are straightforwardly descriptive (“The cat is on the mat), while others are evaluative (“Ice cream is the best dessert”), and still others are normative (“Drinking and driving is forbidden”). Here we see how these categories line up with our fundamental metatheologies, with Creator Theology being descriptive, Perfect Being Theology being evaluative, and Worship-Worthiness Theology being normative.

Author(s):  
Richard Susskind

What mutton-headed, technologically myopic luddite said this? I confess that these are my own words, as they appeared in 1986 in the Modern Law Review. Although this was comfortably more than thirty years ago, I can recall quite vividly what was going through my head (for want of a better term) when I wrote that passage. Today, I disagree with much that I said then. Emotionally, I no longer have any sense of horror in contemplating the possibility that judges might roundly be outperformed by machines. Technically, the passage of time has put me out of date. Computers often can (in some constrained circumstances) satisfactorily process speech and natural language. I also failed (along with most computer scientists) to predict that many of the remarkable advances in computing would come not through explicitly programming systems (whether, for example, to exhibit political preferences or creativity) but through machines ‘learning’ from vast sets of accumulated data. Morally, when I spoke of the values of western liberal democracy, I was reflecting the mood of the late twentieth century. As technology advances, it transpires, as Jamie Susskind explains in Future Politics, that our political conceptions change too. Liberal democracy in the twenty-first century may be significantly different from its ancestor.


Author(s):  
Stephen Neale

Syntax (more loosely, ‘grammar’) is the study of the properties of expressions that distinguish them as members of different linguistic categories, and ‘well-formedness’, that is, the ways in which expressions belonging to these categories may be combined to form larger units. Typical syntactic categories include noun, verb and sentence. Syntactic properties have played an important role not only in the study of ‘natural’ languages (such as English or Urdu) but also in the study of logic and computation. For example, in symbolic logic, classes of well-formed formulas are specified without mentioning what formulas (or their parts) mean, or whether they are true or false; similarly, the operations of a computer can be fruitfully specified using only syntactic properties, a fact that has a bearing on the viability of computational theories of mind. The study of the syntax of natural language has taken on significance for philosophy in the twentieth century, partly because of the suspicion, voiced by Russell, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, that philosophical problems often turned on misunderstandings of syntax (or the closely related notion of ‘logical form’). Moreover, an idea that has been fruitfully developed since the pioneering work of Frege is that a proper understanding of syntax offers an important basis for any understanding of semantics, since the meaning of a complex expression is compositional, that is, built up from the meanings of its parts as determined by syntax. In the mid-twentieth century, philosophical interest in the systematic study of the syntax of natural language was heightened by Noam Chomsky’s work on the nature of syntactic rules and on the innateness of mental structures specific to the acquisition (or growth) of grammatical knowledge. This work formalized traditional work on grammatical categories within an approach to the theory of computability, and also revived proposals of traditional philosophical rationalists that many twentieth-century empiricists had regarded as bankrupt. Chomskian theories of grammar have become the focus of most contemporary work on syntax.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Carvalho ◽  
Mário J. Silva

This paper describes the main characteristics of SentiLex-PT, a sentiment lexicon designed for the extraction of sentiment and opinion about human entities in Portuguese texts. The potential of this resource is illustrated on its application to two types of corpora, the SentiCorpus-PT, a social media corpus, consisting of user comments to news articles, and a literary piece of the early twentieth century, The Poor (Os Pobres), by Raul Brandão. The data were processed by UNITEX, a natural language processing system based on dictionaries and grammars.


Author(s):  
Kelly Erby

In the epilogue of Restaurant Republic, the author traces the story of commercial dining in Boston into the early twentieth century and reviews the major points of the previous chapters. The findings will be useful to those interested in exploring relationships between food, culture, and identity in other cities, as well as in our own time.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Jolanta Mędelska ◽  
Marek Marszałek

Łbem muru nie przebijesz: Tracing Northern Kresy Phraseology of the End of the Twentieth CenturyThe authors studied the little-investigated body of northern Kresy Polish phraseology.The first part of the article briefly presents general, theorical issues related with the status of multi-word constructions, highlighting among these multi-component language units, i.e. reproductions (phrasemes), with the predilection of researchers to describe individual words and avoid multi-word units, even though there are many more of the latter in natural language than single-element units. It has been shown that northern Kresy phrasematics has been particularly neglected. A result of this neglect is the lack of extensive databases of these multi-word units, which in turn makes it impossible to present a credible description of discontinuous units. The authors propose that research should begin with the assembly of a database of northern Kresy phrasematic material nearly from scratch.The empirical part presents the results of initial exploratory research, i.e. performing extraction on a fragment (ca. 110 pages) of a Lithuanian-Polish dictionary published in Vilnius at the end of the twentieth century. The excerpt contains as many as twenty phrasemes that are not found in general Polish, which confirms the thesis that contemporary northern Kresy cultural dialect is saturated with multi-word units. As many as 90% of reproductions are not – most likely apparently, due to the lack of an extensive database – attested in other sources. All are of foreign origin. Interestingly, 35% of the material occurs in all four languages used in Kresy (będziesz gościem; tnie prawdę w oczy; rodzaj ogólny; siedzi jak na igłach; suche miejsce; krupy ryżowe and sygnał samochodowy). Most likely the same living conditions led to the creation of a similar image of the world.The extracted phrasematic material is presented in a formalised manner, adapting the principles of description of language units proposed by Andrzej Bogusławski.  Łbem muru nie przebijesz. Na tropach frazematyki północnokresowej końca XX wiekuAutorzy podjęli studia nad bardzo słabo zbadanym zasobem frazematycznym polszczyzny północnokresowej.W pierwszej części artykułu przedstawiono w dużym skrócie problemy ogólne, teoretyczne związane ze statusem konstrukcji wielowyrazowych, z wyodrębnianiem spośród nich wielokomponentowych jednostek języka, czyli reproduktów (frazemów), z predylekcją badaczy do opisywania pojedynczych wyrazów i pomijania całostek wielowyrazowych, mimo że to właśnie tych ostatnich jest w językach naturalnych znacznie więcej niż jednostek jednoelementowych. Udowodniono, że szczególnie zaniedbana jest obecnie frazematyka północnokresowa. W rezultacie tego zaniedbania dotkliwie brakuje obszernych baz tamtejszych całostek wielowyrazowych, co z kolei uniemożliwia przedstawienie wiarygodnych opisów jednostek nieciągłych. Autorzy postulują rozpoczęcie badań od stworzenia niemal od podstaw północnokresowych frazematycznych baz materiałowych.W części empirycznej przedstawiono rezultaty pierwszego rekonesansu badawczego, czyli poddania ekscerpcji fragmentu (około 110 stron) słownika litewsko-polskiego wydanego w Wilnie u schyłku XX wieku. Ekscerpt zawiera aż 20 frazemów nieogólnopolskich, co potwierdza tezę, że współczesny północnokresowy dialekt kulturalny jest przesycony wielowyrazowcami. Aż 90% reproduktów nie ma – najprawdopodobniej pozornie, z braku obszernych baz – poświadczeń w innych źródłach. Wszystkie jednostki są pochodzenia obcego. Co ciekawe, 35% materiału występuje we wszystkich czterech językach używanych na Kresach (będziesz gościem; tnie prawdę w oczy; rodzaj ogólny; siedzi jak na igłach; suche miejsce; krupy ryżowe i sygnał samochodowy). Prawdopodobnie jednakowe warunki życia doprowadziły do wytworzenia się zbliżonego obrazu świata.Wyekscerpowany materiał frazematyczny zaprezentowano w postaci sformalizowanej, adaptując zasady opisu jednostek języka zaproponowane przez Andrzeja Bogusławskiego.


Author(s):  
Juan Francisco Elices Agudo

Al igual que la parodia, con la que comparte multitud de similitudes, el género épico-burlesco se ha tildado frecuentemente de parasitario por su dependencia del texto original que es objeto de la parodia. Sin ser el caso de Don Quijote de la Mancha, quizá sea éste el más claro ejemplo de narrativa épica-burlesca. A lo largo del siglo XX, escritores como William Boyd han intentado rescatar este género mediante la incorporación de episodios que muestran ciertos paralelismos con este tipo de escritos. El objetivo de este trabajo será, pues, el de trazar un análisis comparativo entre dos de los episodios más significativos de la obra de Cervantes y de An Ice-Cream War (1982)- en los que se puede apreciar de qué manera ambos autores juegan con el contraste entre apariencias y realidad con el fin de parodiar y satirizar los valores y bases de la literatura épica clásica. Asimismo, se intentará profundizar en las estrategias retóricas de que se sirven Cervantes y Boyd para conseguir este efecto épico-burlesco.Palabras clave: Épica-burlesca, sátira, apariencias, realidadABSTRACTSimilarly to parody, the mock-heroic has been usually considered a parasitic genre due mostly to its dependence on the text that is object of its parodic deconstruction. It is precisely Don Quijote de la Mancha, one of the most universal literary accounts, the best example of mock-heroic narrative and a source of insurmountable studies and scholarship. Throughout the twentieth century, some authors have attempted to recuperate this tradition by means of introducing plots that evince certain parallelisms with respect to these early mock-epic works. The purpose of this paper will be, thus, to trace a comparative analysis between two of the most relevant episodes in Don Quijote and William BoydKs An Ice-Cream War -in which we can infer the way in which both authors manipulate the contrast between appearances and reality in order to satirise the foundations of classic epic literature. Also, I will attempt to analyse the rhetorical strategies both Cervantes and Boyd draw on in order to accomplish this mock-heroic effect.Key words: Mock-epic, satire, appearances, reality


Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Andrzej Panufnik

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.


ASHA Leader ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 46-48

This year's Annual Convention features some sweet new twists like ice cream and free wi-fi. But it also draws on a rich history as it returns to Chicago, the city where the association's seeds were planted way back in 1930. Read on through our special convention section for a full flavor of can't-miss events, helpful tips, and speakers who remind why you do what you do.


2004 ◽  
Vol 171 (4S) ◽  
pp. 320-320
Author(s):  
Peter J. Stahl ◽  
E. Darracott Vaughan ◽  
Edward S. Belt ◽  
David A. Bloom ◽  
Ann Arbor

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document