Topics in Programming Languages, a Philosophical Analysis through the case of Prolog

[EN]Programming languages seldom find proper anchorage in philosophy of logic, language and science. is more, philosophy of language seems to be restricted to natural languages and linguistics, and even philosophy of logic is rarely framed into programming languages topics. The logic programming paradigm and Prolog are, thus, the most adequate paradigm and programming language to work on this subject, combining natural language processing and linguistics, logic programming and constriction methodology on both algorithms and procedures, on an overall philosophizing declarative status. Not only this, but the dimension of the Fifth Generation Computer system related to strong Al wherein Prolog took a major role. and its historical frame in the very crucial dialectic between procedural and declarative paradigms, structuralist and empiricist biases, serves, in exemplar form, to treat straight ahead philosophy of logic, language and science in the contemporaneous age as well. In recounting Prolog's philosophical, mechanical and algorithmic harbingers, the opportunity is open to various routes. We herein shall exemplify some: - the mechanical-computational background explored by Pascal, Leibniz, Boole, Jacquard, Babbage, Konrad Zuse, until reaching to the ACE (Alan Turing) and EDVAC (von Neumann), offering the backbone in computer architecture, and the work of Turing, Church, Gödel, Kleene, von Neumann, Shannon, and others on computability, in parallel lines, throughly studied in detail, permit us to interpret ahead the evolving realm of programming languages. The proper line from lambda-calculus, to the Algol-family, the declarative and procedural split with the C language and Prolog, and the ensuing branching and programming languages explosion and further delimitation, are thereupon inspected as to relate them with the proper syntax, semantics and philosophical élan of logic programming and Prolog

The Original Fourth Amendment

The meaning of the rights enshrined in the Constitution provide a critical baseline for understanding the limits of government action—perhaps nowhere more so than in regard to the Fourth Amendment. At the time of the Founding, the Fourth Amendment prohibited the government from entering into any home, warehouse, or place of business, against the owner’s wishes, to search for or to seize persons, papers, and effects, absent a specific warrant. The only exception was when law enforcement or citizens were in active pursuit of a felon.12 Outside of that narrow circumstance, the government was prohibited from search and seizure absent approaching a magistrate and, under oath, providing evidence of the suspected offence and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized. Scholars’ insistence that the Fourth Amendment does not entail a general protection against government entry into the home does more than just fail to appreciate the context. It contradicts the meaning of the text itself, which carefully lays out the conditions that must be met by the government before it may intrude on one’s person, papers, and effects. Reclaiming this meaning is essential for understanding the scope of the original Fourth Amendment

Images of adultery in twelfth and thirteenth-century Old French literature

This thesis examines literary images of masculinity and femininity, their function and depiction in marriage roles and homo-social relationships in the context of crisis: wifely adultery. The study is heavily reliant upon vernacular texts, especially Old French works from the twelfth and thirteenth century including works from the genres of romance, lais, fables, and fabliaux. Latin works including historia and prescriptive texts such as customaries, penitentials, etiquette texts and medical and canon law treatises are also used to contextualise themes in the Old French literature. The introduction summarises modern literary and historical criticism concerning sexuality in the Middle Ages. It then discusses the influences of the Church, philosophy, medicine, natural theory and society on medieval definitions of sexuality to contextualise the literature which is focal to this thesis. The following four chapters each consider a single character in the adulterous affair: the adulteress, the husband, the lover and the accuser. The literary images of each character are analysed in detail revealing the diversity of depictions between and also within genres. This enables the identification of medieval sexual constructs, challenging some previous critiques of representations of sexuality in the Middle Ages. The final chapter explores the language by which the sexual act is presented. Furthermore, it shows how language is used and occasionally abused in committing, prosecuting and evading punishment for adultery and how it can be wielded as a weapon of women. Through the focus of a body of literature rich in depictions of sexuality, this thesis questions the misogynist overtones often attributed to medieval literature. The diversity of images shows that the literature illustrates a wide range of opinions and ideas reflective of the complexity of sexuality in medieval society

Oral Storytelling in Modernism: Narration, Ideology, and Identity

Oral storytellers abound in modernist texts - from T. S. Eliot's inarticulate J. Alfred Prufrock to Djuna Barnes' desultory Dr. Matthew O'Connor, from Joseph Conrad's loquacious Charlie Marlow and other men of the sea to Rebecca West's dainty Harriet Hume. This project theorizes the construction of orality and the figure of the oral storyteller in early to mid-twentieth-century literature, with a focus primarily - but not exclusively - on the British Isles. While the prevalence of such constructions has been surprisingly under-examined by modern literary critics, early to mid-twentieth-century writers were fascinated with oral storytelling, and this fascination provides vital insight into literary modernism's all-important efforts to redefine self and community through art and artistic innovation. Modernist authors employ written representations of oral storytelling to explore and attempt to negotiate the relationship between cultural authority and the formation of modern subjectivities. I examine modernist representations of oral storytelling in works such as Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" (1936), Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Rebecca West's Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929), Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931), and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (1958). By exploring how authors contextualize ideas of orality and the oral storyteller within discourses of nationalism, literary tradition, and technology, I show that the figure of the oral storyteller presents a contact site for the contesting forces that inflect the formulation of self in the early to mid-twentieth-century. These forces include: ideologies of gender and empire; narrative itself as a culturally-inflected schema for understanding experience; and new and recently emergent communication technologies, like the gramophone and radio, which shift early twentieth-century understandings of language, presence, and the limits of the body. Moreover, as inherently self-reflexive moments within texts, scenes of oral storytelling implicitly engage with the defining modernist struggle to both undermine and appropriate the authority of earlier writers and contemporary literary and social traditions. The writers examined in this study use oral storytelling scenes to explore and delineate the relationship between dominant cultural narratives, the material world, and embodied identity

Shakespeare and Boyhood: Early Modern Representations and Contemporary Appropriations

This dissertation demonstrates that Shakespearean boyhood, both in early modern plays and contemporary reimaginings for young readers, critiques patriarchal and hegemonic ideals through the rhetoric and behavior of boy characters. Although critics have called Shakespeare’s boy characters indistinguishable, I find that they provide Shakespeare a unique resource to offer persuasive skepticism about heroic conventions, education, and political instability. This project begins by examining the lexical network of boy in order to chart its uses in early modern England. The subsequent three chapters establish how Shakespeare uses boys to comment on a range of ideal manhoods, such as the chivalrous knight, the Herculean hero, the humanist man of moderation, and several dramatic representations of the monarchy. Having established the diverse ways Shakespeare uses boy characters to negotiate masculine gender ideals, this project then investigates how Shakespearean boyhood is appropriated in contemporary children’s literature. I discover that the gender features regarding Shakespeare’s boys noted in previous chapters find expression in these later adaptations, and that the gender complexities that exist in Tudor-Stuart drama and culture appear in these boy books and point to a more fluid notion of gender identity than critics have hitherto considered. Methodologically, this project draws on masculinity studies, childhood studies, and social histories of the family, as well as gender and adaptation theories to account for the boy’s analogous function in early-modern plays and contemporary novels. The larger significance of the project is in how it enhances our understanding of how Shakespeare conceived of boyhood in his plays and how such plays have been reconceived in contemporary boy books. By analyzing both the early modern representations and contemporary appropriations of Shakespearean boyhood, I first demonstrate how the playwright’s complex use of boyhood critically engages with some of the most pressing issues regarding early modern masculinity and offers compelling skepticism about conventional ideals of early modern manhood. Then, I establish how Shakespearean boyhood resurfaces in these adaptations when children’s authors likewise depict varied and complicated boys equally in dialogue with contemporary gender debates about boyhood

Word Frequency Analysis of Depositions and Court Transcripts Pertinent to The Educational Preparation of the Court Reporter

The purpose of this study was to analyze court transcripts and depositions to establish a basic vocabulary which would approximate the language heard in the courtroom and during deposition hearings. Actual court transcripts and depositions sent by court reporters from throughout the United States were analyzed. Three categories of cases, criminal, civil, and juvenile, were combined into master wordlists, including Vocabulary by Rank Wordlist and Alphabetic Wordlist. Category wordlists by rank were included. The wordlists prepared in this study should serve as a basis for instructional materials to be used in the educational preparation of court reporterBusiness Educatio

The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine

This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath and creativity and the phenomenology of breath and breathlessness. Contributions span the classical, medieval, early modern, Romantic, Victorian, modern and contemporary periods, drawing on medical writings, philosophy, theology and the visual arts as well as on literary, historical and cultural studies. The collection illustrates the complex significance and symbolic power of breath and breathlessness across time: breath is written deeply into ideas of nature, spirituality, emotion, creativity and being, and is inextricable from notions of consciousness, spirit, inspiration, voice, feeling, freedom and movement. The volume also demonstrates the long-standing connections between breath and place, politics and aesthetics, illuminating both contrasts and continuities

Spatial Poetics, Proprioception and Caring for Country in Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems

This thesis looks at the significance of space and place within Charles Olson’s poetics of the archaic postmodern, as a means of clearing a field within which a poetics of custodianship is enunciated. It applies and extends the concept of “nomadology”, formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to argue that Olson’s protagonist in The Maximus Poems can be seen as an exemplification of Pierre Joris’ concept of “a nomad poetics”. Olson’s triad of “topos, typos and tropos” helps structure the thesis and provides a means to approach and explain the Maximus gestalt as human geography: an organic entity arising from and embodying space in order to redefine place. This poesis needs a fully articulated sense of being and a poetics that can encompass human activity in a myriad of dimensions: physics and metaphysics, languages, images and sounds that express a full, corporal sense of the myths and history that Maximus embodies and re-enacts to ensure the survival of a liminal polis, or community of attentions. A specific scene of reading in this respect is Aboriginal Australia, as the thesis expands on tropes that connect ancient cultures to postmodern poetic concerns, and demonstrates that Olson’s ultimate aim is akin to that of recreating country itself. It should be noted that the recreation of country and ownership of the ground upon which Olson’s poetry and poetics are enacted remain the preserve of the original owners, and that his sense of recreation and expansion of a poetic field is not to be conflated with a desire for appropriation, while acknowledging that these operations are inevitably taking place in colonised locations. The thesis concludes by proposing that with due respect to these considerations, the Maximus project remains of vital relevance to a twenty-first century, international readership