Neuro Humanities Research Group of the Department of Human Sciences
University of Catania
Second NeuroHumanities Dialogue
“Metaphors as source of creative thought”
4 - 6 June 2015
CATANIA - Italy
After an inspiring and groundbreaking First Neuro Humanities
Dialogue about “Neuroaesthetics and Cognitive Poetics” at the University
of Catania in 2014, the Neuro Humanities Research Group of the
Department of Human Sciences in Catania will organize a second Dialogue
between neuroscientists and humanists. It will take place from the 4th to the 6th June 2015 at the Benedictine Monastery in Catania.
The topic of the 2015-Dialogue is: Metaphors as source of creative
thought. Keynote speakers of the “Dialogue” 2015 are Neurologist
Anjan Chatterjee from the University of Pennsylvania and Humanities Scholar
Gerard Steen, Director of the Metaphor Lab and Professor of
Language and Communication at the University of Amsterdam. The
peculiarity of the meeting relies on its format: a real dialogue between
two keynote speakers and ten discussants
with plenty of time for discussion and a final roundtable.
Relevant questions of the recent discussion about metaphors will be
at stake: from their cognitive value to the concomitant neural
processes, from their embodied nature to the difference between those
conventionalized in language and discourse and novel ones, between
deliberate and non-deliberate metaphors. Metaphors are at the core of
creative thought, daily communication and artful expression. After the
“cognitive turn” determined by Lakoff and Johnson’s
“Metaphors we live by” (1980) metaphors have been considered as the
result of conceptual mappings across different conceptual domains. We
aim to collect new insights into the origin and function of metaphors as
tools of creative thought comparing the following
different disciplinary perspectives:
- metaphors in cognitive approaches
- metaphors evaluation in empirical studies
- neural correlates in conventionalized and novel metaphorical expression
- metaphors as mental process
- metaphors as artful tool
- metaphors in language and literature.
We invite papers reflecting on problems of research and methodology
as well as case studies, theoretical inquiries, comparative and
interdisciplinary approaches.
Please send a 250-word abstract to
neuhums@gmail.com by the 15th of April.
Visit our homepage: www.neurohumanitiestudies.eu/
