Absolute Time

Absolute Time
Author: Emily Thomas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2018
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198807937
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What is time? This is one of the most fundamental questions we can ask. Traditionally, the answer was that time is a product of the human mind, or of the motion of celestial bodies. In the mid-seventeenth century, a new kind of answer emerged: time or eternal duration is 'absolute', in the sense that it is independent of human minds and material bodies. Emily Thomas explores the development of absolute time or eternal duration during one of Britain's richest and most creative metaphysical periods, from the 1640s to the 1730s. She introduces an interconnected set of main characters - Henry More, Walter Charleton, Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and John Jackson - alongside a large and varied supporting cast, whose metaphysical views are all read in their historical context and given a place in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century development of thought about time. In addition to interpreting the metaphysics of these thinkers, Absolute Time advances two general, developmental theses. First, the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. Second, distinct kinds of absolutism emerged in British philosophy, helping us to understand why some absolutists considered time to be barely real, whilst others identified it with the most real being of all: God.

Time, Causality, and the Quantum Theory

Time, Causality, and the Quantum Theory
Author: S. Mehlberg
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9400989350
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An intermittent but mentally quite disabling illness prevented Henry Mehlberg from becoming recognized more widely as the formidable scholar he was, when at his best. During World War II, he had lived in hiding under the false identity of an egg farmer, when the Nazis occupied his native Poland. After relatively short academic appointments at the University of Toronto and at Princeton University, he taught at the University of Chicago until reaching the age of normal retirement. But partly at the initiative of his Chicago colleague Charles Morris, who had preceded him to a 'post-retirement' profes sorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and with the support of Eugene Wigner, he then received an appointment at that University, where he remained until his death in 1979. In Chicago, he organized a discussion group of scholars from that area as a kind of small scale model of the Vienna Circle, which met at his apart ment, where he lived with his first wife Janina, a mathematician. It was during this Chicago period that the functional disturbances from his illness were pronounced and not infrequent. The very unfortunate result was that colleagues who had no prior knowledge of the caliber of his writings in Polish and French or of his very considerable intellectual powers, had little incentive to read his published work, which he had begun to write in English.

Prose and Poetry through Time

Prose and Poetry through Time
Author: Stephen Huebscher
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2024-10-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004693696
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This is the first major study of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system of a prophetic book. It is also the first book-length study in over 60 years to focus on how genre affects the Hebrew verbal system. It advances a data-driven argument that Biblical Hebrew verb forms do not function one way in prose and another way in poetry. Lastly, the author addresses the diachronic development of Hebrew between the destruction of the First Temple and the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Verbal System of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Verbal System of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Author: Ken M. Penner
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2015-08-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004298444
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In The Verbal System of the Dead Sea Scrolls Ken M. Penner determines whether Qumran Hebrew finite verbs are primarily temporal, aspectual, or modal. Standard grammars claim Hebrew was aspect-prominent in the Bible, and tense-prominent in the Mishnah. But the semantic value of the verb forms in the intervening period in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were written has remained controversial. Penner answers the question of Qumran Hebrew verb form semantics using an empirical method: a database calculating the correlation between each form and each function, establishing that the ancient author’s selection of verb form is determined not by aspect, but by tense or modality. Penner then applies these findings to controversial interpretations of three Qumran texts.

SignGram Blueprint

SignGram Blueprint
Author: Josep Quer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 1009
Release: 2017-11-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501516086
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We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. Current grammatical knowledge about particular sign languages is fragmentary and of varying reliability, and it appears scattered in scientific publications where the description is often intertwined with the analysis. In general, comprehensive grammars are a rarity. The SignGram Blueprint is an innovative tool for the grammar writer: a full-fledged guide to describing all components of the grammars of sign languages in a thorough and systematic way, and with the highest scientific standards. The work builds on the existing knowledge in Descriptive Linguistics, but also on the insights from Theoretical Linguistics. It consists of two main parts running in parallel: the Checklist with all the grammatical features and phenomena the grammar writer can address, and the accompanying Manual with the relevant background information (definitions, methodological caveats, representative examples, tests, pointers to elicitation materials and bibliographical references). The areas covered are Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon, Syntax and Meaning. The Manual is endowed with hyperlinks that connect information across the work and with a pop-up glossary. The SignGram Blueprint will be a landmark for the description of sign language grammars in terms of quality and quantity.