Search Results (71)

This article studies the Histoire critique de Jésus Christ (1770), anonymously published by the German-French atheist Paul d’Holbach, who edited, expanded, and radicalized an anonymous clandestine manuscript concerning the life of Jesus and the beginnings of his religious movement. The article analyzes how d’Holbach’s book mocks the figure of Christ, portraying the new faith as a fraudulent enterprise full of false miracles and human weaknesses. In a work where irony, humor, and ridicule are constantly used as narrative strategies, the demonological world provides opportunities for displaying multiple corrosive arguments against Christianity. After reviewing d’Holbach’s philosophical position against the existence of demons, the article studies how the devils’ role in Christian theodicy, the notion of demonic possession, and Christ’s exorcisms are ridiculed in Histoire critique as examples of irrationality, fraud, and superstition. In addition, the article will point to a contemporary debate influencing d’Holbach’s views on what he saw as the connected territories of demonology, credulity, and religious fanaticism: the controversy surrounding the 18th century convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard. This heterodox religious movement, characterized by belief in a holy man and miraculous cures, proved invaluable to d’Holbach, who maliciously compared this episode to the beginnings of the Christian movement. Full article

A major plank in the Evangelical apologetics platform (especially for the Jewish witness) has always been the predictive prophecy about Jesus in the Hebrew Bible. The number of these prophecies or “predictions” varies widely among Conservative–Evangelical sources. A brief survey of claims about the number of Christ-related Old Testament (OT) prophecies ranges from 50–400+. Regardless, the assertion of direct, intentional Old Testament prophetic pronouncement about Jesus has been a non-negotiable mainstay of Evangelical thought and theology since its beginning. However, today, those who align with the Evangelical movement in general, would disagree on technical grounds with the traditional way that Messianic prophecy has been explained hermeneutically or exegetically. Progressive Evangelicals, however, generally are concerned with the interpretation or exegesis of biblical passages in their grammatical–historical–cultural contexts. The focus is on texts rather than traditions. An irony is that traditional and untraditional Evangelicals who favor contextual exegesis in principle are still very divided when it comes to explaining how the NT used the OT, especially in relation to Messianic prophetic texts. This article describes the problem and illustrates it with examples of how some older and newer Evangelicals disagree when commenting on OT Messianic prophetic passages. Full article

The Inferno highlights many categories of sins and varieties of pains yet it has another unifying theme. From the earliest descriptions of Christian monastic discipline to the Benedictine Rule and beyond, “inner death” inspired contemplatives to confront the hell that awaits them if they succumb to pride, give way to sloth (acedia), or lack humility. Scholastic theologians (e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure) developed the notion, and mendicant preachers brought it to laypeople like Dante Alighieri. Inner death has ironic force in the Inferno because it contradicts the inscription on the gates of hell: “Abandon all hope you who enter”. Yes, one must abandon all hope upon entering hell unless, through the cultivation of inner death, one does so “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (midway in the journey of our life—Singleton), while alive. Here is the irony; here is inner death. If living persons contemplate the consequences in hell of their faults in life, they transcend them and escape. Full article

Figurative language is a complex construct related to intelligence. Psychology and psycholinguistics are trying to understand it from an interdisciplinary perspective, but studies are still scarce, methodologies are heterogeneous, and results are difficult to integrate. Some studies suggest that understanding the cognitive processes underlying figurative language and its forms could provide a new approach to understanding intellectual differences, such as high intellectual ability (HIA), and new instruments to assess it. The language of HIA children develops earlier and includes the use of irony, which involves metalinguistic skills. In this context, the present study aims to offer an instrument, called the verbal irony questionnaire (or VIrQ), to test the comprehension of verbal irony in students with HIA. A convenience sample of n = 169 students with HIA, aged between 7 and 15 years, responded to the VIrQ. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted. The results revealed that 33 items were retained and categorized into four factors. F1, ironic dissociation (14 items); F2, ironic attitude (8 items); F3, ironic constructions (7 items); and F4, reinforced irony echo (4 items). All factors have adequate reliability indices above 0.70 and below 0.95. Finally, new perspectives are also discussed. Full article

Background: The aim of this study is to use an eye tracker to compare the understanding of three forms of implicitness (i.e., presupposition, conversational implicatures, and irony) in 139 pupils from the first to the fifth year of elementary school. Methods: The child was invited to read short texts composed of a context about some characters and a target sentence conveying one of the three kinds of implicitness. After that, there was a comprehension yes/no question to check whether the child had understood the implicit content of the target sentence. At the same time eye, movements were recorded by a remote system (Pro Fusion by Tobii). The number of correct answers, the duration, and the number of fixations on the texts were measured. Results: We showed that children’s reading time is positively correlated with the accurate comprehension of implicitness, and that children similarly understand the three types of implicitness. Furthermore, the number and the duration of fixations depend both on the age of the children and on their good or poor understanding of the implicit contents. This fact is particularly noticeable for children in the first-grade class, for whom fixations are significantly longer and more frequent when they correctly understand sentences containing implicitness. Conclusion: These results argue in favor of the possibility of teaching the comprehension of some types of implicitness (presupposition, implicature, and irony) from an early age. Full article

Background/Objectives: Figurative language is a central tool for enriching spoken and written languages, and it is important for building social relationships. Difficulties in figurative language understanding may impair social adjustment. Some studies have found more gaps in the understanding of irony and idioms among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to those of their peers with typical development (TD). To date, no studies have examined the relationship between the ability to understand social situations (as a separate ability) and the ability to understand irony and idioms. The present study examined the roles of theory of mind (ToM) and social situation understanding in the comprehension of idioms and ironic criticism. Methods: The current study included 58 participants aged 8–11, including 28 children with high-functioning ASD and 30 children with TD matched by age, gender, and nonverbal intelligence. All the participants completed a ToM questionnaire that assesses their understanding of others’ intentions, as well as a questionnaire pertaining to their comprehension of social situations, ironic criticism, and idioms. Results: TD children outperformed the autistic children in idiom and irony understanding, as well as in ToM and social situation understanding. Understanding social situations and ToM contributed to idiom and irony understanding, with ToM ability uniquely contributing to irony (but not to idiom) understanding. Path analysis revealed that social cognitive abilities mediated the link between group affiliation and vocabulary, affecting figurative language comprehension. Conclusions: The present study demonstrates that social cognition skills influence the ability to understand ironic criticism and idioms, mediating the association between vocabulary and figurative language comprehension. Full article

Reinhold Niebuhr stands alone among many 20th century theorists of religion and politics for at once rejecting both the natural law tradition of just war, as well as the secular-rationalist tradition of his progressive contemporaries. Nowhere is his dual criticism more evident than in his critical stance on technology in war. For Niebuhr, technological advancements were not only inevitable, but sometimes necessary to develop in the face of advances from nefarious actors in world affairs. But using technologically advanced weapons risked destroying the moral authority of a nation by engaging in utilitarian calculus. Religious and military ethicists concerned with the integration of technological advancement in contemporary war would do well to consider Niebuhr’s thought and how it might be developed further in order to address the new concerns raised not only by modern tools such as drones, hypersonic weapons, and AI, but also by whatever yet to be developed technologies remain past the temporal horizons. Full article

Internet memes are a special type of digital content that is shared through social media. They have recently emerged as a popular new format of media communication. They are often multimodal, combining text with images and aim to express humor, irony, sarcasm, or sometimes convey hatred and misinformation. Automatically detecting memes is important since it enables tracking of social and cultural trends and issues related to the spread of harmful content. While memes can take various forms and belong to different categories, such as image macros, memes with labeled objects, screenshots, memes with text out of the image, and funny images, existing datasets do not account for the diversity of meme formats, styles and content. To bridge this gap, we present the PolyMeme dataset, which comprises approximately 27 K memes from four categories. This was collected from Reddit and a part of it was manually labelled into these categories. Using the manual labels, deep learning networks were trained to classify the unlabelled images with an estimated error rate of 7.35%. The introduced meme dataset in combination with existing datasets of regular images were used to train deep learning networks (ResNet, ViT) on meme detection, exhibiting very high accuracy levels (98% on the test set). In addition, no significant gains were identified from the use of regular images containing text. Full article

It is an irony of history that since texts transcend the intentions and purposes of their authors, their meaning and significance are often contested anew as they enter new historical contexts; even historical texts are thus subject to reading and criticism over time. This article discusses the posthumous fate of Henry Stubbe’s own text on Islamic history, The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism—seen by some to represent a Copernican revolution in the study of Islam. The fate of this work is a clear example of the critical contingencies and fluctuating fortunes experienced by a corpus of texts. The continuing existence of a text as an object open to reconfiguration and re-evaluation is termed its after-history (Nachgeschichte) or afterlife (Nachleben). This notion of the afterlife of an object as a period of critical appreciation and political appropriation aptly defines the fate and fame of The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism. The present study seeks to explore the narrative surrounding a publication authored by Stubbe in the 17th century and finally published by Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shairani, with the critical support of Ottoman intellectual Halil Halid Bey, nearly two centuries later. Its objective is to investigate how the life and contributions of a figure whose work has transcended generations was resurrected within the political backdrop of the 20th century, as evidenced in the columns of Ottoman newspapers. Full article

This paper demonstrates how natural language processing methods can support the computer-aided rapid assessment of young adults suffering from anorexia nervosa. We applied natural language processing and machine learning techniques to develop methods that classified body image notes into four categories (sick/healthy, past tense, irony, and sentiment) and analyzed personal vocabulary. The datasets consisted of notes from 115 anorexic patients, 85 healthy participants, and 50 participants with head and neck cancer. To evaluate the usefulness of the proposed approach, we interviewed ten professional psychologists who were experts in eating disorders, eight direct (first contact) staff, and fourteen school counselors and school psychologists. The developed tools correctly differentiated the individuals suffering from anorexia nervosa, which was reflected in the linguistic profile and the results of the machine learning classification of the body image notes. The developed tool also received a positive evaluation from the psychologists specializing in treating eating disorders, school psychologists, and nurses. The obtained results indicate the potential of using natural language processing techniques for the computer-aided rapid assessment of a person’s condition in terms of anorexia nervosa. This method could be applied as both a screening tool and for the regular monitoring of people at risk of eating disorders. Full article

Iron accumulation in the brain is a common feature of many neurodegenerative diseases. Its involvement spans across the main proteinopathies involving tau, amyloid-beta, alpha-synuclein, and TDP-43. Accumulating evidence supports the contribution of iron in disease pathologies, but the delineation of its pathogenic role is yet challenged by the complex involvement of iron in multiple neurotoxicity mechanisms and evidence supporting a reciprocal influence between accumulation of iron and protein pathology. Here, we review the major proteinopathy-specific observations supporting four distinct hypotheses: (1) iron deposition is a consequence of protein pathology; (2) iron promotes protein pathology; (3) iron protects from or hinders protein pathology; and (4) deposition of iron and protein pathology contribute parallelly to pathogenesis. Iron is an essential element for physiological brain function, requiring a fine balance of its levels. Understanding of disease-related iron accumulation at a more intricate and systemic level is critical for advancements in iron chelation therapies. Full article

This paper examines the relevance of the sentence concept to the understanding of three types of implicitness (presupposition, conversational implicatures, irony). Our experimental protocol involved 105 children (aged 6 to 11) and 82 adults who were asked to read short texts composed of a context about some characters and a target sentence conveying one of the three implicit contents. After reading, children and adults had to answer a comprehension yes-no question and indicate the segments from the text that helped them answer the question. Results showed a difference between the three types of implicitness, with presupposition being detected and understood at a subsentential level, whereas implicatures and irony come under extrasentential level requiring the context to be taken into account. Referring to sentence as a unit of meaning does not seem relevant as soon as understanding is not limited to the literal meaning of what is written, but also concerns what is meant by the text. Full article

Utterances containing verbal irony display prosodic particularities that distinguish them from non-ironic speech. While some prosodic features of irony have been identified in Spanish, previous studies have not accounted for different subtypes, nor have they examined this phenomenon in Chilean Spanish despite the unique intonation patterns in this dialect. This study examined the acoustic and prosodic correlates of five subtypes of irony (jocularity, rhetorical questions, understatements, hyperbole, and sarcasm) spontaneously occurring in the casual speech of sociolinguistic interviews with fifteen Chilean women. We segmented 3907 syllable nuclei from 197 spontaneously occurring instances of irony and compared the syllables within the ironic utterances to those in the pre-ironic utterances, along seven acoustic and prosodic variables: pitch range, duration, F0, F1, F2, H1*–H2*, and HNR. The results showed that the speakers favored jocularity and did not produce sarcasm or understatements, and that jocularity, hyperbole, and rhetorical questions significantly differed from the baseline utterances along a variety of acoustic and prosodic measures. We argue that these cues contributed to marking the ironic utterances as salient, allowing these women to talk about difficult real-life events with a touch of humor. Our study provides additional evidence for the connection between prosody and pragmatics in Chilean Spanish and lays the groundwork for further examination of irony and prosody in this and other Spanish dialects. Full article

Iron is an essential micronutrient for athletes, intricately linked to their performance, by regulating cellular respiration and metabolism. Impaired iron levels in the body can significantly hinder athletic performance. The increased demand for iron due to exercise, coupled with potential dietary iron insufficiencies, particularly among endurance athletes, amplifies the risk of iron deficiency. Moreover, prolonged exercise can impact iron absorption, utilization, storage, and overall iron concentrations in an athlete. On the contrary, iron overload may initially lead to enhanced performance; however, chronic excess iron intake or underlying genetic conditions can lead to detrimental health consequences and may negatively impact athletic performance. Excess iron induces oxidative damage, not only compromising muscle function and recovery, but also affecting various tissues and organs in the body. This narrative review delineates the complex relationship between exercise and iron metabolism, and its profound effects on athletic performance. The article also provides guidance on managing iron intake through dietary adjustments, oral iron supplementation for performance enhancement in cases of deficiency, and strategies for addressing iron overload in athletes. Current research is focused on augmenting iron absorption by standardizing the route of administration while minimizing side effects. Additionally, there is ongoing work to identify inhibitors and activators that affect iron absorption, aiming to optimize the body’s iron levels from dietary sources, supplements, and chelators. In summary, by refining the athletic diet, considering the timing and dosage of iron supplements for deficiency, and implementing chelation therapies for iron overload, we can effectively enhance athletic performance and overall well-being. Full article

Sarcasm and irony represent intricate linguistic forms in social media communication, demanding nuanced comprehension of context and tone. In this study, we propose an advanced natural language processing methodology utilizing long short-term memory with an attention mechanism (LSTM-AM) to achieve an impressive accuracy of 99.86% in detecting and interpreting sarcasm and irony within social media text. Our approach involves innovating novel deep learning models adept at capturing subtle cues, contextual dependencies, and sentiment shifts inherent in sarcastic or ironic statements. Furthermore, we explore the potential of transfer learning from extensive language models and integrating multimodal information, such as emojis and images, to heighten the precision of sarcasm and irony detection. Rigorous evaluation against benchmark datasets and real-world social media content showcases the efficacy of our proposed models. The outcomes of this research hold paramount significance, offering a substantial advancement in comprehending intricate language nuances in digital communication. These findings carry profound implications for sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and an enhanced understanding of social media dynamics. Full article