2,128 research outputs found
Atonement and the Cry of Dereliction from the Cross
Any interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement has to take account of relevant biblical texts. Among these texts, one that has been the most difficult to interpret is that describing the cry of dereliction from the cross. According to the Gospels of Mathew and Mark, on the cross Jesus cries, âMy God, my God, why have you forsaken me?â In this paper, I give a philosophical analysis of the options for understanding the cry of dereliction, interpreted within the constraints of orthodox Christian theology; and I show the suggestiveness of this analysis for interpretations of the doctrine of the atonement
An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs
In this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true of P iff P bears the âessenceâ of Gâwhatever this essence isâwhich is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features associated with G and predicted of P. Since there is no essence that is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features of a social group, slurs have null-extension, and consequently, many sentences containing them are either meaningless or false. After giving a detailed outline of my theory, I show that it receives strong linguistic support. In particular, it can account for a wide range of linguistic cases that are regarded as challenging, central data for any theory of slurs. Finally, I show that my theory also receives convergent support from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics
Towards transversality of singular varieties: splayed divisors
We study a natural generalization of transversally intersecting smooth
hypersurfaces in a complex manifold: hypersurfaces, whose components intersect
in a transversal way but may be themselves singular. Such hypersurfaces will be
called splayed divisors. A splayed divisor is characterized by a property of
its Jacobian ideal. This yields an effective test for splayedness. Two further
characterizations of a splayed divisor are shown, one reflecting the geometry
of the intersection of its components, the other one using K. Saito's
logarithmic derivations. As an application we prove that a union of smooth
hypersurfaces has normal crossings if and only if it is a free divisor and has
a radical Jacobian ideal. Further it is shown that the Hilbert-Samuel
polynomials of splayed divisors satisfy a certain additivity property.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure; v2: minor revision: inaccuracies corrected and
references updated; v3: final version, to appear in Publ. RIM
Omnipresence, Indwelling, and the Second-Personal
The claim that God is maximally present is characteristic of all three major monotheisms. In this paper, I explore this claim with regard to Christianity. First, Godâs omnipresence is a matter of Godâs relations to all space at all times at once, because omnipresence is an attribute of an eternal God. In addition, God is also present with and to a person. The assumption of a human nature ensures that God is never without the ability to be present with human persons in the way mind-reading enables; and, in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God is present in love
The different time course of phonotactic constraint learning in children and adults : evidence from speech errors
Speech errors typically respect the speakerâs implicit knowledge of language-wide phonotactics (e.g., /Ć/ cannot be a syllable onset in the English language). Previous work demonstrated that adults can learn novel experimentally-induced phonotactic constraints by producing syllable strings in which the allowable position of a phoneme depends on another phoneme within the sequence (e.g., /t/ can only be an onset if the medial vowel is /i/), but not earlier than the second day of training. Thus far, no work has been done with children. In the current 4-day experiment, a group of Dutch-speaking adults and nine-year-old children were asked to rapidly recite sequences of novel word-forms (e.g., kieng nief siet hiem) that were consistent with phonotactics of the spoken Dutch language. Within the procedure of the experiment, some consonants (i.e., /t/ and /k/) were restricted to onset or coda position depending on the medial vowel (i.e., /i/ or âieâ versus /ĂžË/ or âeuâ). Speech errors in adults revealed a learning effect for the novel constraints on the second day of learning, consistent with earlier findings. A post-hoc analysis at trial-level showed that learning was statistically reliable after an exposure of 120 sequence-trials (including a consolidation period). In contrast, cChildren, however, started learning the constraints already on the first day. More precisely, the effect appeared significantly after an exposure of 24 sequences. These findings indicate that children are rapid implicit learners of novel phonotactics, which bears important implications for theorizing about developmental sensitivities in language learning
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