Digital Commons Network^™

The Inability Of Negative Higher Criticism To Undermine The Biblical Portrait Of Jesus Christ, Brett Arthur Seybold

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Paul Tillich described, the attempt of historical criticism to find the empirical truth about Jesus of Nazareth as a failure. John Dominic Crossan described this lack of consensus among critical scholars regarding the person of Jesus as “a bad joke.” This lack of consensus by skeptics, as well as their shared reluctancy to abandon the task of attempting to make sense of who Jesus Christ truly was historically serves as the backbone of this dissertation where I argue that Jesus transcends negative higher criticism in particular and the post-Christian mindset in general. I argue that He constitutes a suis generis …

Artificial Intelligence Adoption And Utilization By Librarians In University Libraries In Kwara State, Nigeria, Abdrahman Atanda Moustapha, Ibrahim .O. Yusuf Mr.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study investigated how librarians working in various university libraries in Kwara State, Nigeria, adopt and use artificial intelligence. The study raised four research goals as well as four research questions. A descriptive survey method and random sampling techniques with 450 randomly selected librarians from Kwara State Universities, Nigeria, were used for the research. Five research assistants were trained on how to contact respondents and secure their consent before distributing the structured questionnaire designed by the researcher, who assisted in the tool distribution process. The researcher was able to retrieve 410 copies of the 450 questionnaires that were given to …

October 12, 2023, Csusb

Coyote Chronicle (1984-)

No abstract provided.

What Is Music? The Ontological Status Of Musical Works, Michael Pipko

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

The ontological status of musical works is a controversial topic among those in the field. This paper aims to argue for a nominalist and non-reductive approach to musical works that differentiates musical works from the sound structures commonly equated with them. The difference between sound structures and musical works is heavily emphasized and I conclude that musical works have emergent attributes sound structures do not. These attributes being creatability, fine individuation, and the inclusion of performance means. After establishing this I begin to build an argument for a nonreductive approach to musical works by rejecting the extreme view held by …

Semiotic Exograms: Extending The Mind Fully, Robert Reimanis

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

This essay is an analysis and expanded defense of John Sutton’s essay “Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process.” The first section of the essay surveys the extended mind literature, following the first and second waves of the Extended Mind theory. The second section explains Sutton’s exograms as external representations of internal thought. This section also details his argument that exograms extend the mind because, historically, exograms play a role in the internal functioning of a mind. The third section defends Sutton’s argument from objections against their place in mental processes, namely memory. The fourth section …

Why Wrestle With Being And Time? A Justification Of Heidegger’S Methodology Of Obscurantism And Obfuscation, Dave Mckerracher

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

It seems that complaints about Heidegger’s style of writing are common fare in secondary literature and the classroom. This paper argues that both Heidegger’s obtuseness and obscurantism work as methodological devices for effectively communicating and demonstrating his thought. By obfuscating, he forces breakdowns, which pulls the reader out of her ready-to-hand mode of reading/revealing, which otherwise threatens to fall into comprehending via reference from one’s average everydayness. By being obscure in some passages where taking the meaning in multiple ways will not interfere with the main points being made, Heidegger enables his students to form personal (existentiell) interpretations, allowing for …

On Aristotle’S Function Argument, Angela Han

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

In this paper, I will reflect upon Aristotle’s argument claiming that the function of a human being is to engage in activity of soul in accord with reason (AWR). I will explicate and further defend this argument, which is based on the fact that the function of X must characterize it as an X and set a standard for X’s impairment and excellence, and the only candidates for a human’s function are: to take in nutrients and grow, to perceive and move, and to engage in activities of soul in accord with reason. I will raise the objection that having …

Deflationary Nominalism’S Commitment To Meinongianism, Anthony Nguyen

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

Deflationary nominalism is a novel view in the philosophy of mathematics on which there are mathematical statements, such as ‘There are prime numbers’ that are literally true despite the nonexistence of any mathematical objects. In this paper, I outline the deflationary nominalism of Azzouni, the most prominent contemporary defender of deflationary nominalism. I then object that it is committed to some form of Meinongianism. Because I believe that any view’s commitment to Meinongianism constitutes a strong reason in favor of rejecting that view, I suggest that deflationary nominalism should be rejected. Finally, I conclude that realism about mathematical objects must …

Critical Reflections On Intentions And Linguistic Communication, Brian Haas

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

This paper has the following structure: first, Paul Grice’s original account of non-natural meaning (in “Meaning”) is critically discussed; second, Stephen Neale’s analysis (in “Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language”) is critically discussed; third, Kent Bach and Robert Harnish’s analysis of linguistic communication is critically discussed; lastly, due to considerations detailed in the previous section, doubts are raised about the viability of intentional based semantics. In discussing Neale and Bach and Harnish, two novel counter-examples are employed to show their analyses to be inadequate.

Materialist And Casual Bridges Over The Explanatory Gap, Celine Geday

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

I offer that the explanatory gap about consciousness can be bridged by a materialist account that is compatible with the causal closure of the physical world. I suggest that Jaegwon Kim’s argument for causal closure is the best motivation for materialist explanations of consciousness, or the character of subjective experience. I then propose that the best materialist account available to do this explanatory work, that is also compatible with a causal closure condition, is Austen Clark’s feature-placing hypothesis. Feature-placing has it that sensory individuals, or qualitative properties, are picked out by their locations in space around a perceiver, and it …

On Perception And Autonomy Considered Through The Phenomenological Understanding Of Emotion Described By Kym Maclaren, Erika Grimm

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

Female philosopher Kym Maclaren, in her article, “Emotional Metamorphoses: The Role of Others in Becoming a Subject,” explores a phenomenological view on emotion as being-in-the-world as well as the ethical implications of understanding emotion in opposition to the moralistic view. In the first part of this paper, I provide an exegetical assessment of Maclaren’s thesis; in the second I introduce a critique of Maclaren’s argument and argue a claim of my own which explores perception and autonomy in the human body along with its implications in the context of Maclaren’s phenomenological account of emotion. I discuss the necessity of both …

Duality Unresolved And Darwinian Dilemmas, Anson Tullis

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

By using Sharon Street’s Darwinian Dilemma, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer attempt to show that Sidgwick’s duality of practical reason, whereby an agent has equal reason to act in their own interests or act impartially for the benefit of all, is not actually a duality, rather, reasons for action are solely impartial due to the unreliability of intuitions favoring self-interested behavior. My contention is that the author’s fail to accomplish their goal. To show this, I argue that the authors are inconsistent, that Singer has previously provided an account of impartiality that makes it just as unreliable on the …

Properties, Direction Of Fit And An Argument For Property Realism, Rachel Rapp

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

There is much debate about the existence of properties and how to consider both tropes and universals. While the antirealist contends that there are no true universal properties, the realist affirms that there are mind-independent universal properties. In this essay I present an argument for the realist approach to the problem of universals based off of the concept of direction of fit. After beginning with a discussion of properties, I discuss antirealist approaches to explaining the problem of universals, arguing that there are inherent problems with antirealism about properties that render it unsatisfactory. It becomes clear that universals must exist, …

Sellars’ Paradox And Language Games, Jiayi Lu

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

In “Some Reflections on Language Games,” Wilfrid Sellars contemplates whether there is a genuine paradox in learning a first language. It seems that we must know a metalanguage in order to learn a first language, and a meta-metalanguage in order to learn a metalanguage, and so on, because we cannot learn the linguistic expression of a thing without grasping its matching concept. The idea of language as a language game paves the way to a solution to this paradox by presenting an account of pre-conceptual base-level language acquisition.

Standardized Versus Naturalized: An Evaluation Of Child Morphological And Syntactic Assessments, Jaclyn Shurman, Dorothy Leone

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

Speech-language pathologists may choose to evaluate children’s language using standardized or naturalized assessments. This study investigated if the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Preschool 2 (CELF-P 2), a standardized assessment, and language sampling, a naturalized assessment, reveal the same information about children’s linguistic competence and performance. Children ages 3.0-7.0 were assessed with specific focus on morphology and syntax. The participants completed four morphosyntactic-based subtests of the CELF-P 2. Additionally, play-based interactions, used to elicit natural language, were video-recorded. The CELF-P 2 was scored and language samples were transcribed and analyzed. Mean length of utterance (MLU) scores showed a slightly more variable …

Towards A Humean Solution Of Vagueness In Language And Ontology, Matthew Hernandez

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

This paper explores how a Humean may respond to issues of vagueness in philosophy of language—and in extension—ontology. It begins with an examination of the sorites paradox and two common responses: epistemicism, and eliminativism. I then turn to David Hume’s conception of abstract ideas as a way to determine how vague terms refer and then compare this view to both epistemicism and eliminativism. The paper ends with a defense of the Humean view as a synthesis of the two, which ultimately questions the formulation of the sorites paradox as a proper use of language.

Semantics Embodied: Cognitive Linguistics And Searle’S Account Of Linguistic Intentionality, Krivo Flores

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

John Searle has long argued that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind. In his view the capacity of speech acts to represent and relate to reality derives from more biologically basic forms of intentionality, such as perception and action, which initially evolved to relate organisms directly to their environments. Searle’s naturalistic model of language, in order to be complete, requires a theory of how perception and action specifically give rise to linguistic meaning and interpretation. In this paper I argue that recent theoretical developments in cognitive linguistics and the emerging field of embodied cognition …

Problems For Infinitism, Keith Wynroe

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

Infinitism in epistemic justification is the thesis that the structure of justification consists in infinite, non-repeating series. Although superficially an implausible position, it is capable of presenting strong arguments in its favour, and has been growing in popularity. After briefly introducing the concept and the motivations for it, I will present a common objection (the finite minds problem) as well as a powerful reply which couches Infinitism in dispositional terms. I will then attempt to undermine this counter-objection by drawing parallels between it and the problems raised against semantic dispositionalism by Kripke’s exegesis of Wittgenstein’s private language argument.

32. Using Our Languages Improves Our Health (I), Makha Blu Wakpa, Alice Taff

CoLang 2022 Workshops

During this workshop, together we'll become aware of connections between language use and wellbeing. We'll talk about how different cultures define health. (“Western Desert Aborigines see 'health' not only in the absence of sickness, but more positively: on the physical side, in the presence of coldness and dryness in the body, and on the spiritual side, in having one’s spirit in the area of the stomach. Conversely, when the spirit moves to the back of a person or leaves the body altogether, when the body is hot and wet, then the person is considered sick.” Peile, A. R. 1997 Body …

Adapting The Adapters For Code-Switching In Multilingual Asr, Atharva Kulkarni, Ajinkya Kulkarni, Miguel Couceiro, Hanan Al Darmaki

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Recently, large pre-trained multilingual speech models have shown potential in scaling Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to many low-resource languages. Some of these models employ language adapters in their formulation, which helps to improve monolingual performance and avoids some of the drawbacks of multi-lingual modeling on resource-rich languages. However, this formulation restricts the usability of these models on code-switched speech, where two languages are mixed together in the same utterance. In this work, we propose ways to effectively fine-tune such models on code-switched speech, by assimilating information from both language adapters at each language adaptation point in the network. We also …

Renaissance Or Revolution? Legacies Of Pan-Arabism In The Egyptian Arab Spring, Claire Wagner, Ali Gheissari

Creative Collaborations: Annual Showcase of Undergraduate Research

This project explores the degree that Pan-Arabism influenced in Egypt's Arab Spring and how the Arab Spring represented the unfinished goals of decolonization in Egypt. The evidence suggests that the relationship between Pan-Arabism and the Arab Spring is complex. The promises of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century were economic and political independence with self-rule, explicitly separate from the influence of the colonizing powers, the British and French, Pan-Arabism promised social and political unity based on shared language and ethnicity and included broader goals such as the liberation of Palestine. During the decolonization campaign Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970; PM 1954-56; Pres. …

On Gary Snyder’S Tradaptation Of Cold Mountain Poems And Its Spiritual Salvation And Literary Enlightenment In Postwar America, Hu Anjiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of …

Children’S Gothic In The Chinese Context: The Untranslatability And Cross-Cultural Readability Of A Literary Genre, Chengcheng You

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999­–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability …

Translating Literary Ideology From Ancient Chinese Into Modern French: François Cheng’S Francophone Poetry In Double Chant (2000), Gabriel F. Y. Tsang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

François Cheng (1929- ), elected to the Académie Française in 2002, structurally introduced the lexicological, syntactic, and semiotic form of Tang poetry to the French academia via his academic works. In the late 1980s, François Cheng shifted his focus from academic writing to creative writing, both in French, winning the 1998 Prix Femina for his novel Le Dit de Tianyi (1998) and Prix Roger Caillois for his collection of poems Double chant (2000). Focusing on his less-discussed poetry, which reveals higher congruity of his understanding of Chinese literary classics with creative representation, this paper argues that, as an analyst of …

Storytelling As A Way Of Translation: The Rendition Of Taoism In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe Of Heaven, Xiulu Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is an immensely popular author of numerous science fictions and fantasy classics. A number of critics have noticed the influence of Taoism on Le Guin’s writing.critical insights offered by Translation Studies and Walter Benjamin’s comments on storytelling and translation, this paper argues that storytelling and translation are similar discursive practices that aim at the exchange of experiences, creating knowledge, and shaping culture. Taking Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) as a case study, this paper delves into how her storytelling serves as a unique form of translation, bridging the thought of ancient Chinese Taoist …

Ecopoetry As Method: Reading Gary Snyder As A Cultural Mediator Between China And The World, Winnie L M Yee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ecocriticism is a field that is inherently cross-cultural, and poetry is an art form that creates bonds across cultural communities. This paper focuses on Gary Snyder, a prominent poet in his own right, who is famous for his translation of the works by Chinese poet Han Shan. His attraction to Chinese classical poetry and Eastern civilization offers an alternative to the Western developmental paradigm, and the ecopoetry he espouses is pertinent to today’s environmental debates. His references to nature do not function merely as reminders that nature should be respected but as an impetus to reflect on the coexistence of …

The Animal In The Wild In Hwang Sun-Mi’S The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, Sarah Yoon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Hwang Sun-mi’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly has become a contemporary classic children’s story in Korea since its original publication in 2000. Since then, the story has been translated and redesigned with new illustrations in almost thirty different countries (Y. Kim). The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly centers on a hen that raises a duckling as her “baby,” with the story drawing upon a rich reservoir of cultural associations between humans and nature in East Asian traditions. In this story, the hen leaves the human-dominated barnyard, based on profit, exploitation, and competition, for a reconnection with moral …

Cybervandalism Detection In Wikipedia Using Light Architecture Of 1d-Cnn, Azha Talal Mohammed Ali, Huda Hallawi, Noor D. Al-Shakarchy

Karbala International Journal of Modern Science

The rapid expansion of human-software-agent interaction has come with new issues. Accordingly, different engage-ments are necessary to adapt to changing human needs in dynamic socio-technical systems. Generally, cybervandalism is the act of leaving any negative impact on any piece of writing in an attempt to modify it. In Wikipedia, vandalism is any attempt to modify an article in a way that negatively affects the article's quality. Recently, several automatic detec-tion techniques and related features have been developed to address this issue. This work introduces a deep learning model with a new and light architecture to detect vandalism in Wikipedia articles. …

Engineering Students Emotional Intelligence And Neuro-Linguistics Programming (Nlp) As Developmental Tool, Ahlem Khefacha, Beatrix Séllei

Research Papers

This article investigates the strengths and weaknesses of engineering students' emotional intelligence (EI) and the possibility of using neurolinguistics programming (NLP) as a developmental tool. Students' emotional intelligence was assessed using the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-I) with 5 points Likert scale. Firstsemester engineering students were approached by part of a broader study at the Budapest University of Technology during 2018-2022. In the article, we describe the emotional intelligence profile of more than 3600 students in various fields of engineering. NLP professionals around the world filled out the second questionnaire. We got answers from 35 professionals based in Tunisia, Hungary, …

Political Fragmentation In The Democracies Of The West, Richard H. Pildes

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

The decline of effective government throughout most Western democracies poses one of the greatest challenges democracy currently confronts. The importance of effective government receives too little attention in democratic and legal theory, yet the inability to deliver effective government can lead citizens to alienation, distrust, and withdrawal from participation, and worse, to endorse authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through the dysfunctions of democratic governments.

A major reason for this decline in effective government is that democracies have become more politically fragmented. Political power has been dispersed among many more political parties, organized groups, and even more spontaneous, instantly mobilized …