University of Lund, Sweden, 6-8 May 2011

Session on the SEMIOTICS OF RELIGIOUS BELIEVING

What can structural semiotics and the other humanities learn from new ‘hard’ approaches about religious believing? What can cognitive studies and neurosciences learn from ‘soft’ approaches? Is there a way to bridge the gap between what religious believing is in signs, texts, and cultures and what it is in brains and minds?

The session particularly welcomes proposals on the following topics:

1) Perspectives from semiotic studies about religious believing in general and about the dialectics it holds with specific systems of religious beliefs in particular, no matter what the semiotic approach involved (Peircean semiotics, structural semiotics, cultural semiotics, phenomenological semiotics, cognitive semiotics, biosemiotics, and so on and so forth);
2) Perspectives from cognitive studies and neurosciences about religious believing in general and about the dialectics it holds with specific systems of religious beliefs;
3) Comparative studies focusing on several ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ perspectives;
4) Comparative studies, from the point of view of semiotics and/or cognitive studies, about the relation between religious believing and other forms of believing, including the role of believing in the domain of science;
5) Theoretical ideas and experimental projects about bridging the gap between the semiotics of (religious) believing and the cognitive studies on (religious) believing.

Proposals (max 500 words) should be sent to massimo.leone@unito.it and NASS2011@semiotik.lu.se by January 10, 2010.