Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2011. 178 pp., 1 fig., num. tables and graphs ISBN 978-3-631-61726-7 hb.
Human beings are cultural by nature. The human mind is as much the individual result of exquisite evolutionary engineering, as it is the outcome of an intense synergy with other minds in a densely social environment, shaped by culture. This realization encourages an interdisciplinary dialogue, in which scientists and humanists come together to discuss two challenges: studying culture in the age of cognitive science, and studying cognition with culture in mind.
Contents: Mark Turner: The embodied mind and the origins of human culture - Alexandre Castro-Caldas: The neurophysiological foundation of human cognition - Peter Hanenberg: Cognitive Culture Studies - Where science meets the humanities - Per Aage Brandt: What is culture? - A grounding question for cognitive semiotics - Ansgar Nünning: Towards a metaphorology of crises, or: The uses of cognitive metaphor theory for the study of culture - Augusto Soares da Silva: What's in a word? Mental and linguistic representations, culture(s) and the negotiation of meaning - Maria Clotilde Almeida: More on forbidden fruit blending: prying into the Portuguese mind - Ana Margarida Abrantes: Narrative - a key concept for cognition and culture - Vera Nünning: Interfaces between the cognitive sciences and the humanities.
More information here.
Opening session: 15.00 - 15.15
General topic: From Body to Mind to Culture (Embodiment and the unification of science and humanities)
Mark Turner: The Embodied Mind and the Origins of Human Culture
Alexandre Castro Caldas: The neurophysiologic foundations of human cognition
Peter Hanenberg: Cognitive Culture Studies – a path toward the unification of science and humanities
Morning session: 10.00-13.00
General topic: Culture Studies in the Age of Cognitive Science
Per Aage Brandt: What is human culture? From cognitive unity to cultural diversity (and back again)
Ansgar Nünning: Crises and Catastrophes: The Uses of Cognitive Metaphor Theory for the Study of Culture
Augusto Soares da Silva: What is in a word? Linguistic representations, culture(s) and the negotiation of meaning
Ana Margarida Abrantes: Narrative – a key concept for cognition and culture
The CECC Conference on Cognition and Culture emerges in the context of this interdisciplinary research. It aims at promoting awareness about the cognitive foundation of culture across disciplinary fields of research, which traditionally focus on specific socio-cultural processes . This event intends to promote a reframing of the concept of culture, so that it encompasses not onlythe difference and variety of its products and manifestations, but also the cognitive conditions.
The guest speakers are distinguished researchers from different fields such as evolution psychology, aesthetics, cultural sciences, cognitive science, neurology and linguistics. They represent high rank institutions where studies on cognition and culture are presently being developed with different but compatible agendas.
The aim of hosting this event at the CECC Research Center for Communication and Culture is to broaden the span of culture studies within the research activities of this institution. The research line “Translating Europe across the ages” is committed to combine traditional cultural studies with research on the cognitive foundations of culture and cultural representations, which enable translation practices (here understood not only as semiotic transpositions but exchange of mental representations).
Moreover, by hosting this colloquium in Lisbon, the CECC aims at promoting international co-operation (particularly a closer and sustainable trans-Atlantic co-operation between the CECC in Lisbon and the CCC in Cleveland).
Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor and Chair of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. His most recent book publication is an edited volume, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, from Oxford University Press. His other books and articles include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society (Oxford), The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford), Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton), and Death is the Mother of Beauty (Chicago). He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University. He is external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience and distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology. In 1996, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises.
Per Aage Brandt is the author of a dozen books and more than 150 published papers on cognitive and semiotic theory of language, grammar, aesthetics, art, and music.
As a scholar trained in Romance Philology (French and Spanish), he has worked his way through structural linguistics and structural semantics, and elaborated a series of models - in particular related to the technical and formal representations of textual phenomena such as enunciation, diegesis, and modal schematisms - for describing patterns of meaning in the framework of a discourse-oriented (Greimas) and later a formalized phenomenological (Thom, Petitot) and cognitively (Talmy) oriented semiotics.
In 2002, he was awarded the Grand Prix de Philosophie by l'Académie française and was made Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
Per Aage Brandt is Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Center for Cognition and Culture at Case Western Reserve University. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Cognitive Semiotics.
Ansgar Nünning has been Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany since 1996. He is the founding director of the
Alexandre Castro-Caldas is the Director of the Health Sciences Institute of the Catholic University of Portugal. Until February 2004 he was Full Professor of Neurology at the University of Lisbon and Head of the Department of Clinical Neurosciences of the Hospital de Santa Maria, in Lisbon, Portugal. He earned his M.D. and his Ph.D. from the University of Lisbon School of Medicine, where he started his career in 1974.
He has been responsible for the Language Research Laboratory until 1998 and organized the Center for Neurosciences of Lisbon in 1990. He was President of the International Neuropsychological Society (2000-2001). His publications include a textbook of Neuropsychology in Portuguese, papers in international journals (Brain, Neurology, NeuroImage, Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences, JINS) and multiple chapters in national and international books. He is member of the editorial board of several national and international journals. His current research interests include several topics in Cognitive Neurosciences and in particular the modulatory effect of environmental stimulation in the human brain.
On February 11, 2009 he will receive the Distinguished Career Award from the International Neuropsychological Society, in Atlanta (USA).
Augusto Soares da Silva is Associate Professor of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Portugal. After obtaining his PhD degree in Portuguese Linguistics with a doctoral dissertation in the field of cognitive semantics and under the supervision of Dirk Geeraerts, he launched the first MA program in Cognitive Linguistics in Portugal. He is the author of numerous publications on cognitive semantics and lexical semantics. He was the coordinator of the research project ConDiv, on the Lexical Convergence and Divergence of the Portuguese Language, which was supported by a research grant of the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology. In 2006 he was awarded the Grande Prémio Internacional de Linguística Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra by the Portuguese Language Society for his book “O Mundo dos Sentidos em Português: Polissemia, Semântica e Cognição”.
His current research interests are cognitive semantics, lexical semantics, linguistic variation and change, cognitive grammar and corpus linguistics.
She has previously co-edited in 2006 Questions on the Linguistic Sign, Proceedings of the International Colloquium held on January 27, 2005 at the Faculty of Letters-University of Lisbon and Prismas de Formação: Contributos para o Desenvolvimento das Competências dos Formadores (2005). Presently, she is co-editing Questions on Language Change, Proceedings of the International Colloquium held on November 16, 2006 at the Faculty of Letters-University of Lisbon (in print).
She is co-author together with Professor Jürgen Schmidt-Radefeldt (University of Rostock) of the Wörterbuch der Jugendsprache Portugiesisch-Deutsch/Dicionário da Linguagem dos Jovens Português-Alemão/Alemão-Português, Peter Lang, Rostocker Romanistische Arbeiten 14 (in preparation); she also co-authors Jogar futebol com as palavras: representações metafóricas e mescladas no jornal “A Bola” à luz da abordagem cognitiva (Playing football with words: a cognitive study of metaphors and blends in “A Bola”)(in preparation).
Post-doc researcher at the Research Center for Communication and Culture, Catholic University of Portugal.aculdade de Ciências Humanas, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Linha Translating Europe Across the Ages)
Visiting Research Scholar, Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University
She studied German and English Studies at the Universities of Aveiro, Essen and Innsbruck. She obtained her Masters Degree in Cognitive Linguistics from the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Braga in 2001 with a thesis on the cognitive foundations and strategies of euphemism. From 1997 until early 2006 she taught German Language and Linguistics and Didactics at the Department of German Studies of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Viseu. In 2008 she finished her PhD project in the field of German Language and Literature: Meaning and Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Peter Weiss’ Prose Work.
She received a grant from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian to develop her research at the Center for Semiotics of the University of Aarhus, from February until November 2006, and a doctoral grant from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia to conclude her dissertation at the Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University.
Her research interests encompass German Studies, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Poetics and Culture and Cognition Studies.