In recent decades, historians of religions have turned to, and developed, entirely new methodologies for the study of religion and human consciousness. Foremost among these are a collection of approaches often termed the “cognitive science of religion” (CSR), typically drawing on cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, and contemporary metaphor theory. Although we are still “early” in this enterprise, I hope to show how a meaningful dialogue between religious studies and contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science can help us to better understand some (...) intriguing mystical texts and practices from a tradition of medieval South Asian Hinduism. Known collectively as the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, these followers of transgressive and antinomian Tantric Yoga provide excellent examples for exploring the nature of religion, ritual, consciousness, embodiment, identity, gender, emotions and sexuality. This paper will show how the study of these rich materials from seventeenth through eighteenth century Bengal in northeastern South Asia can be enhanced using insights from the philosopher Shaun Gallagher and the neurologist Patrick McNamara. (shrink)

Summary This paper aims to bridge anthropological and cognitivist research undertaken by Gilbert Durand and Mark Johnson, who studied the phenomenon of meaning making in a similar way, although they had to use different terminology as their disciplines demanded. Durand established systematization for analyzing symbolism by taking into account the position of the body and the perceptions determining the underlying schemata of symbols. Two decades later, Mark Johnson described image schemata as gestalts having an internal structure derived from bodily perceptions. (...) Owing to these similarities, a comparison between Durand and Johnson’s theories is offered first. In the second place, I reviewed the cognitive value of the anthropological regimes of imaginaire described by Durand. During the analysis, the terminology used by these theorists (like ‘image schemata’ or ‘axiomatic schemata’) was comparatively analyzed to find common ground between their positions. In conclusion, the need for recovering theories of imagination proposed by heterodox scholars like Durand is highlighted, since they anticipate the role of images and imagination not only in language, as Johnson demonstrated, but also in the formation of anthropologically relevant symbols, which are of interest for the analysis of literature and other arts. (shrink)

Summary In the epistemic frame of the biocultural turn and of the neuroaesthetics, we have developed neurohermeneutics as an approach to literature that aims at contributing to the current debate about the linkage between literary, cognitive and neuroscientific studies, focusing on the relationship between mindbrain processes mirrored in the formal features of the text and the strategies activated by the author in a text in order to guide the reader in imagining, emotionally feeling and cognitively getting meanings out of the (...) literary experience. The aim of the neurohermeneutical approach is to grasp and describe phenomenologically the mirroring process between the two extremes of the literary experience, i.e. the writer’s creative process as it is mirrored in the formal features of the literary work and the reader’s imaginative reconfiguration of the text, and what they share in common. The reader revives the mental imaginative processes of the author by creating his/her unrepeatable individual experiences of the text and subjectively redesigning it in an endless loop of features that trigger the imagination and its creative potential both while writing and by reading literature. (shrink)