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Metaphor has been an issue of intense research and debate for decades (see, for example [1]). Researchers in various disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, computer science, education, and philosophy have developed a variety of theories, and much progress has been made [2]. For one, metaphor is no longer considered a rhetorical flourish that is found mainly in literary texts. Rather, linguists have shown that metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in everyday language, a major force in the development of new word meanings, and the source of at least some grammatical function words [3]. Indeed, one of the most influential theories of metaphor involves the suggestion that the commonality ...
What expectations did the women and men living in early monastic communities carry into relationships of obedience and advice? What did they hope to achieve through confession and discipline? To explore these questions, this study shows how several early Christian writers applied the logic, knowledge, and practices of Galenic medicine to develop their own practices of spiritual direction. Evagrius reads dream images as diagnostic indicators of the soul's state. John Cassian crafts a nosology of the soul using lists of passions while diagnosing the causes of wet dreams. Basil of Caesarea pits the spiritual director against the physician in a competition over diagnostic expertise. John Climacus crafts pathologies of passions through demonic family trees, while equipping his spiritual director with a physician's toolkit and imagining the monastic space as a vast clinic. These different appropriations of medical logic and metaphors not only show us the thought-world of late antique monasticism, but they would also have decisive consequences for generations of Christian subjects who would learn to see themselves as sick or well, patients or healers, within monastic communities.
Sumptuously illustrated with dazzling objects, this publication explores the ways art and science worked hand in hand in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Through the manipulation of materials, such as gold, crystal, and glass, medieval artists created dazzling light-filled environments, evoking, in the everyday world, the layered realms of the divine. While contemporary society separates science and spirituality, the medieval world harnessed the science of light to better perceive and understand the sacred. From 800 to 1600, the study of astronomy, geometry, and optics emerged as a framework that was utilized by theologians and artists to comprehend both the sacred realm and the natural worl...
Embodied cognition represents one of most important research programs in contemporary cognitive science. Although there is a diversity of opinion concerning the nature of embodiment, the core idea is that cognitive processes are influenced by body morphology, emotions, and sensorimotor systems. This idea is supported by an ever increasing collection of empirical studies that fall into two broad classes: one consisting of experiments that implicate action, emotion, and perception systems in seemingly abstract cognitive tasks and the other consisting of experiments that demonstrate the contribution of bodily interaction with the external environment to the performance of such tasks. Now that t...
Frameworks -- Beauty -- Art -- Music -- Dance -- Architecture.
Neuroethics is a theoretical and practical discipline that considers the many ethical issues that arise in neuroscience. From its inception, the field has sought to develop an ethical vision from within the confines of science, a task that is both misguided and, in the end, impossible. Providing a solid theoretical foundation for neuroethics means looking to other sources, most specifically to philosophy. In this groundbreaking work, the author examines the current underpinnings of neuroethical thinking and finds them inadequate to the task of neuroethics – to think ethically about persons, technology and society. Grounded in the physicalist and deterministic presuppositions of contemporar...
Aesthetics has long been the preserve of philosophy, art history, and the creative arts but, more recently, the fields of psychology and neuroscience have entered the discussion, and the field of neuroaesthetics has been born. In Brain, Beauty, and Art, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume consists of essays from foundational researchers whose empirical work launched the field. Each essay is anchored to an original, peer-reviewed paper from the short history of this new and burgeoning subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience. Authors of each essay were as...
Much has been written on witchcraft by historians, theologians, philosophers, and anthropologists, but nothing by scientists. This book aims to reappraise witchcraft by applying to it the advances in cognitive sciences. The book is divided into four parts. Part I ("Deep History") deals with human emotions and the drive to represent witches as evil female agents. Part II ("Historical Times") focuses on those rare state and church repressions of malefice, which, surprisingly, did not feature in Islamic lands. Modern urbanization dealt a blow to the rural civilizations where accusations of witchcraft were rife. Part III ("In the Laboratory") applies neuroscience to specific case studies to inve...
This textbook provides a global, chronological mapping of significant areas of theatre, sketched from its deepest history in the evolution of our brain's 'inner theatre' to ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern developments. It considers prehistoric cave art and built temples, African trance dances, ancient Egyptian and Middle-Eastern ritual dramas, Greek and Roman theatres, Asian dance-dramas and puppetry, medieval European performances, global indigenous rituals, early modern to postmodern Euro-American developments, worldwide postcolonial theatres, and the hyper-theatricality of today's mass and social media. Timelines and numbered paragraphs form an overall outline with distilled details of what students can learn, encouraging further explorations online and in the library. Questions suggest how students might reflect on present parallels, making their own maps of global theatre histories, regarding geo-political theatrics in the media, our performances in everyday life, and the theatres inside our brains.
When we think of kinship, we usually think of ties between people based upon blood or marriage. But we also have other ways—nowadays called ‘performative’—of establishing kinship, or hinting at kinship: many Christians have, in addition to parents, godparents; members of a trade union may refer to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Similar performative ties are even more common among the so-called ‘tribal’ peoples that anthropologists have studied and, especially in recent years, they have received considerable attention from scholars in this field. However, these scholars tend to argue that performative kinship in the Tribal World is semantically on a par with kinship ...