Vito Evola

Abstract Traditionally, spiritual experiences have been considered «ineffable», but metaphors pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental in people's attempts to talk about such abstract ideas. Whether it be during the description of a vision or simply talking about morality, people use conceptual metaphors to reason and talk about these concepts. Many representations of God, spirits or the afterlife are culturally based, but whereas some may differ based on individual experiences, others seem to have a more ...

I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series of interviews, in particular with two Christian street preachers. The data includes speech, gesture, and commented drawings of God, themselves and paradise. Some of the metaphors analyzed are: metaphors for God (FATHER, SHEPHERD, LOVER, etc); GOOD/GOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN; STRICT FATHER vs. NURTURING PARENT; MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY. This data demonstrates that the more entrenched a frame of mind is, ...

AbstrAct Religion plays a crucial role in the way one conceives and perceives oneself and oneself respect to the world. Some people will admit that they need to construct their personhood actively, but with the help of God, and divinity is often viewed as a proxy agent (eg Saint ...

METAFORE DEL VIVENTE Linguaggi e ricerca scientifica tra filosofia, bios e psiche a cura di Elena Gagliasso, Giulia Frezza I lettori che desiderano informarsi sui libri e le riviste da noi pubblicati possono consultare il nostro sito Internet: www. francoangeli. it e iscriversi nella home page al servizio" Informatemi" per ricevere via e. mail le segnalazioni delle novità. FrancoAngeli Milano, 2010 3. Evoluzione, cambiamento e progresso tra metafora e frame Vito Evola* 1. Evoluzione: dalla scienza alla vita quotidiana L'evoluzione è una di ...

This paper intends to contribute to the multimodal turn-taking literature by presenting data collected in an improvisation session in the context of the performing arts and its qualiquantitative analysis, where the focus is on how gaze and the full body participate in the interaction. Five expert performers joined Portuguese contemporary choreographer, João Fiadeiro, in practicing his Real Time Composition Method during an improvisation session, which was recorded and annotated for this study. A micro-analysis of portions of the session was conducted using ELAN. We found that intersubjectivity was avoided during this performance, both in the performers’ bodily movements and mutual gaze; we extrapolate that peripheral vision was chiefly deployed as a regulating strategy by these experts to coordinate turn-taking. A macro-analysis comparing the data with an analogous one obtained from NonPerformers provides the context for a discussion on multimodality and decision-making.

Traditionally, spiritual experiences have been considered «ineffable», but metaphors pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental in people's attempts to talk about such abstract ideas. Whether it be during the description of a vision or simply talking about morality, people use conceptual metaphors to reason and talk about these concepts. Many representations of God, spirits or the afterlife are culturally based, but whereas some may differ based on individual experiences, others seem to have a more universal character. From a phenomenological point of view, it seems that the descriptions are contingent and not necessary, that is, the language a believer is exposed to may influence, but not condition a priori, his or her own spiritual experience as Constructivists have thought. How do today's common believers relate to certain metaphors about spiritual concepts transmitted by their faiths? What do these metaphors say about the individuals' conce...

The contemporary interdisciplinary domain of gesture studies is heavily rooted in the cognitive linguistics enterprise (Evans, Bergen & Zinken, 2007), especially concerning its “cognitive commitment” (Lakoff, 1990: 40), aligning gesture research within research on cognition. There is a growing body of literature highlighting that gesture may very well be part of language competence, playing a decisive role in language evolution and development (see infra). The dual cognitive and social function of gestures is the primary focus in gesture studies, with gestural phenomena being viewed as offering “a window into the mind” and playing a vital role in social interactions. After providing a historical perspective and a brief overview of some fundamentals of gesture studies, this chapter will focus on functional and formal aspects found in gesture studies highlighting their relationship with cognitive linguistics. The chapter will then discuss the need for research on gestural meaning-making, or “gesture phonology”, and gesture categorisation before highlighting future directions in the area of human computer interaction.

This study presents a microanalysis of what information performers “give” and “give off” to each other via their bodies during a contemporary dance improvisation. We compare what expert performers and nonperformers (sufficiently trained to successfully perform) do with their bodies during a silent, multiparty improvisation exercise, in order to identify any differences and to provide insight into nonverbal communication in a less conventional setting. The coordinated collaboration of the participants (two groups of six) was examined in a frame-by-frame analysis focusing on all body movements, including gaze shifts as well as the formal and functional movement units produced in the head-face, upper-, and lower-body regions. The Methods section describes in detail the annotation process and inter-rater agreement. The results of this study indicate that expert performers during the improvisation are in “performance mode” and have embodied other social cognitive strategies and skills (e...

This paper investigates a linguistic phenomenon generally and generically described as an ethical dative. In particular, we focus on those second-person non-lexical datives in French and Italian used to draw the attention of the addressee on the event narrated, where the second-person dative referent can be aptly paraphrased as:“I'm telling you (that) P”,“you should keep in mind that P”. For example:

Abstract: Uno degli assunti fondamentali della linguistica e psicologia cognitive è che ogni percezione ed espressione è connessa alla nostra biologia, e più di quanto si pensasse in precedenza. Dopo una panoramica della letteratura cognitivista orientata per l'indipendenza tra linguaggio e pensiero, evidenzierò punti problematici di questa posizione avvalendomi di ricerche empiriche da un lato condotte in ambito neuro-cognitivista e dall'altro di tipo psicolinguistico. Proporrò degli spunti a favore della 'contro-tesi'per cui il pensiero implica ...

In "Two heads are better than one," "head" stands for people and focuses the message on the intelligence of people. This is an example of figurative language through metonymy, where substituting a whole entity by one of its parts focuses attention on a specific aspect of the entity. Whereas metaphors, another figurative language device, are substitutions based on similarity, metonymy involves substitutions based on associations. Both are figures of speech but are also expressed in coverbal gestures during multimodal communication. The closest neuropsychological studies of metonymy in gestures has been nonlinguistic tool-use, illustrated by the classic apraxic problem of body-part-as-object (BPO, equivalent to an internal metonymy representation of the tool) vs. pantomimed action (external metonymy representation of the absent object/tool). Combining these research domains with concepts in cognitive linguistic research on gestures, we conducted an fMRI study to in...

Historically Christianity owes much to Judaism. St. Paul’s Christianity, however, changed the way of thinking of many of the first Jews because of a new way of reasoning about selfhood, the human body, and human cognition. Without wanting to treat certain theological concepts, I want to underline how modern science’s view of the person is closer to traditional Judaism than it is to Christianity, and how Paul’s “error” was diffused throughout the Western world, by analyzing the semantics of linguistic references to the body, the soul, and emotions. What was St. Paul’s error? The question means to be both allusive and provocative. He was born by the name Saul in the city of Tarsus, in modern Turkey, during the height of its splendour as a Roman-Greek city. Paul grew up as a “free man”, that is, as a Roman citizen in a cosmopolitan environment. He is considered to be the most influential and productive of the testimonies of the Christian thought throughout Asia Minor and Western Europe...

In this paper the authors introduce their infographic approach for the presentation of dance data from two extensive case studies on the creative processes of two very dissimilar contemporary choreographers. This approach has been developed in the framework of the BlackBox - Arts & Cognition Project and was implemented in both 2D and 3D environments, resulting in the creation of four short animated infographic films, a documentary film, and a multiple viewport platform for two 360-degree dance videos. Drawing on selected examples from these film productions, the authors discuss in two distinct case studies, which aspects of contemporary dance and choreographic thinking are computed and visualized in ways that allow to access each choreographer’s unique artistic vision and creative process. Based on this discussion, the authors suggest to consider a broader perspective on what might constitute ‘dance data’, and elaborate on how such data sets can be presented visually employing embod...

Data and materials used for "Coordinated collaboration and nonverbal social interactions: A formal and functional analysis of gaze, gestures, and other body movements in a contemporary dance improvisation performance" J Nonverbal Behav. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-019-00313-2

Abstract: In this essay I propose a hermeneutic model of the higher level understanding during on-line ritual reading by devotees of their respective sacred literatures, using the in-struments provided by cognitive sciences. The way a devotee reads a sacred text differs from the way he or she would read a common piece of literature or how a lay person might read the same sacred text. After providing an overview of metaphor, anthropomorphism, and the “religious brain”, I suggest how devotee-readers might make sense of a religious text and why it should be so important for their own personal everyday life. Universals are implicated in this genre of literature and the way it is interpreted.

Why do some people have life-changing experiences when reading sacred texts, and what makes them so differently significant readings as opposed to reading the newspaper or any kind of book? Exploring a set of metaphors used in the literature of mysticism, and in particular in the canonical literature of world religions, I use the instruments provided by conceptual integration and empirical data of the neurosciences to offer a hermeneutic model of the higher level understanding construed during on-line reading by devotees of their respective sacred literature. Constructivists of the past two decades have considered the mystical experience as a form of "reconditioning of consciousness," (the concepts condition a priori the experience), arguing that there are no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. I believe cognitive science helps prove that the description of the experience is contingent and not necessary; the language used in devotional literature to describe mystical exper...

THE BEGINNINGS OF SYMBOLIC-RELIGIOUS COGNITION - Cognitive Archeology and Cognitive Fluidity: About 30,000 years ago (70,000 years after the fossil records of the anatomically modern human), religious thought and symbolic conceptual activity arose from the capacity of integrating specific-domain a process called "cognitive fluidity" (Mithen 1996). Metaphor, Anthropomorphism and Cognitive Science: Metaphor is a basic mental capacity by which people understand themselves and the world around them through conceptual mappings of knowledge between mental spaces, using everyday knowledge to reason about more abstract concepts. Of all the templates for supernatural concepts, the ones that seriously matter to people are invariably person-like, because people are the most complex type of object that people know (Boyer 2001). WHY GOD AS AN EROTIC LOVER? - Diffusion and elaboration of religious memes: To reason about the ties between divine and human, man looks at his repertoire of h...

In this essay a hermeneutic model of the higher level understanding during on-line ritual reading by devotees of their respective sacred literatures is proposed, using the instruments provided by cognitive sciences. The way a devotee reads a sacred text differs from the way he or she would read a common piece of literature or how a lay person might read the same sacred text. After providing an overview of metaphor, anthropomorphism, and the “religious brain”, it is suggested how devotee-readers might make sense of a religious text and why it should be so important for their own personal everyday life. Universals are implicated in this genre of literature and the way it is interpreted.

Storicamente il cristianesimo deve molto al giudaismo. Il cristianesimo di San Paolo, tuttavia, ha cambiato il modo di ragionare su concetti come il se, il corpo, e la cognizione umana. Senza volere trattare certi concetti teologici, mi prefiggo di sottolineare come il punto di vista della scienza moderna e piu vicino al giudaismo tradizionale che al cristianesimo, e di spiegare la diffusione dell’“errore” di Paolo nel mondo occidentale, analizzando la semantica dei riferimenti linguistici (e in particolar modo le metafore e le metonimie) dei concetti anima e corpo e del rapporto con la concezione del se. Cresciuto da “uomo franco” cioe, da cittadino romano in un ambiente cosmopolita, Paolo e considerato il testimone piu influente e produttivo del pensiero cristiano nell’Asia Minore e nell’Europa Occidentale. Le sue epistole circolarono durante la sua vita e continuano ad influenzare miliardi di seguaci, i quali spesso interpretano le sue idee in modo contrastante, ma ciononostante ...

Los textos islamicos ensenan que cualquier manera de hablar de Dios no es sino una metafora, es decir, una manera de hablar acerca de Dios de tal modo que el ser humano pueda comprender facilmente (cf. Bausani, 1980: 16-17). En este sentido, se trata de metaforas conceptuales tal como son explicadas por la Linguistica Cognitiva: cuando el Qur an, o la Biblia, u otros textos sagrados hablan de la Divinidad en terminos humanos, usan metaforas, y se recurre esencialmente a la metafora conceptual de alto nivel ABSTRACTO ES CONCRETO. ?Como se relacionan los creyentes y practicantes de hoy, y no solamente los teologos, con ciertas metaforas transmitidas por su fe?, y ?que pueden decirnos dichas metaforas sobre los conceptos que los individuos tienen sobre si mismos? Por otra parte, ?de que manera mantiene el creyente una representacion viable de si mismo y del mundo que le rodea a pesar de los aspectos aparentemente contradictorios de sus representaciones? En este articulo intento mostrar...

A philological and comparative analysis of the lexical items concerning personhood in Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Modern English reveals semantic shifts concerning the relative lexical concepts. Ancient Hebrew presents an essentially holistic idea of personhood, whereas, via Biblical translations and Greek philosophical influences, the Western World has conceptualized humans as being dualistic in nature. I analyze the polysemy and semantic shifts in the lexicon used for "body" and "soul" in Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek, which are the two linguistic systems known by St. Paul of Tarsus, and then confront them with Paul's usage context, and finally with Modern English, hypothesizing a possible case of linguistic relativity.

Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in understanding the relationship between people’s thoughts and the language they use. Spiritual and religious experiences (particularly the ones involving some type of revelation from or communication with a transcendent being) are especially interesting since they involve some type of external, physically invisible force or agent, contributing an “ineffable” quality to the phenomenon. However, people can and do describe such events, and metaphors and blends pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental when attempting to talk about such abstract ideas. One of the main tenants of Cognitive Linguistics is that people’s views about themselves and the world around them are deeply rooted in their conceptual systems, created by their experiences and their bodily interactions with the world, whether they be physical, psychological or social. People who practice spiritual...

I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series of interviews, in particular with two Christian street preachers. The data includes speech, gesture, and commented drawings of God, themselves and paradise. Some of the metaphors analyzed are: metaphors for God (FATHER, SHEPHERD, LOVER, etc); GOOD/GOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN; STRICT FATHER vs. NURTURING PARENT; MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY. This data demonstrates that the more entrenched a frame of mind is, the less plastic it is, because the primary source domain of our habitual conceptual metaphor will always motivate any other “laminated domain mappings”, or blends, especially for such meaningful concepts like personhood or belief systems. My investigation will try to shed new light on the phenomenology of religious experiences and personhood, using cognitive linguistics as a prime tool of analysis.

Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in understanding the relationship between people’s thoughts and the language they use. Spiritual and religious experiences (particularly the ones involving some type of revelation from or communication with a transcendent being) are especially interesting since they involve some type of external, physically invisible force or agent, contributing an “ineffable” quality to the phenomenon. However, people can and do describe such events, and metaphors and blends pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental when attempting to talk about such abstract ideas. One of the main tenants of Cognitive Linguistics is that people’s views about themselves and the world around them are deeply rooted in their conceptual systems, created by their experiences and their bodily interactions with the world, whether they be physical, psychological or social. People who practice spiritual...

Abstract Traditionally, spiritual experiences have been considered «ineffable», but metaphors pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental in people's attempts to talk about such abstract ideas. Whether it be during the description of a vision or simply talking about morality, people use conceptual metaphors to reason and talk about these concepts. Many representations of God, spirits or the afterlife are culturally based, but whereas some may differ based on individual experiences, others seem to have a more ...

I will explore some of my conclusions concerning conceptual metaphors collected during a series of interviews, in particular with two Christian street preachers. The data includes speech, gesture, and commented drawings of God, themselves and paradise. Some of the metaphors analyzed are: metaphors for God (FATHER, SHEPHERD, LOVER, etc); GOOD/GOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN; STRICT FATHER vs. NURTURING PARENT; MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY. This data demonstrates that the more entrenched a frame of mind is, ...

The web has long since moved out of the IT and design departments and become a pervasive communications medium. As a result, top-notch minds from other disciplines have begun to help make it more robust, vibrant and just plain useful than before.

Dr. Evola has one of these minds. He’s applying it to the web in part by teaching a course on web standards at the College of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Palermo, Italy. Dr. Evola’s linguistics background gives him a fresh perspective on web standards:

    The first lessons deal with the “need” for XHTML and CSS, moving towards a more advanced knowledge of CSS1 and CSS2, keeping in mind that standards means nothing less than “speaking correctly” with our target.

Read the rest of the WaSP Education Task Force’s excellent interview for more from a linguist turned standardista.

Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in understanding the relationship between people’s thoughts and the language they use. Spiritual and religious experiences (particularly the ones involving some type of revelation from or communication with a transcendent being) are especially interesting since they involve some type of external, physically invisible force or agent, contributing an “ineffable” quality to the phenomenon. However, people can and do describe such events, and metaphors and blends pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental when attempting to talk about such abstract ideas. One of the main tenants of Cognitive Linguistics is that people’s views about themselves and the world around them are deeply rooted in their conceptual systems, created by their experiences and their bodily interactions with the world, whether they be physical, psychological or social. People who practice spirituality reach certain states by means of personal or collective rituals, such as prayer, meditation, and bodily procedures involving discipline, as is the case of fasting or re-understanding pain. When they then communicate certain religious and spiritual concepts, they are revealing a great deal about themselves and their world and the way they interact with it. Concepts dealing with people’s system of beliefs are very “meaningful” for the individual, and the more entrenched a frame of mind is, the less plastic it is, a fact confirmed by the neurosciences which claim that it is difficult to break down and reconstruct certain synaptic structures of the brain. But how do people who have had such awesome experiences represent these supernatural encounters and their states of being? What is the relationship between the concepts of body and soul in devotees who torture their bodies, who have out of body experiences or who describe a body possessed by other spirits? What does the language they use say about the individuals’ concept of themselves and their world? I will present some of my own research data containing conceptual metaphors and blends collected in various sacred texts and during a series of interviews of people who claim to have had such supernatural experiences. The data includes linguistic expressions as well as gesture. Moreover, the interviewees were asked to draw on paper certain experiences of spiritual nature and then to describe their pictures. My investigation will try to shed new light on the phenomenology of spiritual experiences and personhood, using cognitive linguistics as a prime tool of analysis.

Ancient Jewish teaching circa selfhood was quite holistic. The Hebrew word nefeš is often translated as “soul” but also means “body”, whereas Paul clearly distinguishes the two, talking about a co-existence, “concupiscence”, and the necessity of dominating the body to exalt the spirit. I will examine the semantic changes in words dealing with body and soul, and how Paul’s authority eventually influenced the Western world’s way of reasoning about such concepts.

“Evoluzione” è una parola usata ormai frequentemente dall’uomo comune nonché in tutte le discipline, umanistiche e scientifiche. Culturalmente radicata, è diventata una metafora potente. Una definizione corrente è “sviluppo lento e graduale; svolgimento da una forma a un’altra, generalmente più completa e perfetta” (Garzanti). In questi termini non si parla soltanto dell’evoluzione biologica dell’uomo, ma anche dell’evoluzione del linguaggio, della società, della cognizione umana – a prescindere da un’effettiva conoscenza delle teorie evoluzionistiche. L’evoluzione, in quanto teoria biologica, rimanda quasi automaticamente alla teoria di Darwin, il quale, tuttavia, ha usato il termine solo una volta, nel paragrafo finale del suo celeberrimo L’origine delle specie (1859). Nel concetto di evoluzione è comunemente implicato il passaggio da una specie “primitiva” ad una specie “progredita”, più avanzata o sofisticata e strutturalmente più complessa. Nei suoi scritti, Darwin preferiva parlare di “discendenza con modificazioni” anziché di “evoluzione”, termine usato invece da Bonnet (1762) nella sua teoria dell’homunculus, proprio perché portatore della valenza semantica di “progresso”, non presente nella teoria che Darwin proponeva. Infatti, per quest’ultimo “evoluzione” ha più a che fare con il cambiamento (x --> y) che con il progresso (x --> x+1). L’idea che il concetto di evoluzione abbia a che fare con quello di progresso è in realtà posteriore: nell’accezione più comune del termine è presente l’idea di una temporalità lineare, nella quale l’hic et nunc è visto come la massima compiutezza dello sviluppo, della complessità e della “modernità”, e il passato è visto da un punto di vista situato in un setting storico del presente (antropo-, etno-, euro-, ego-centrico etc), in un’opposizione binaria tra “adesso” e “allora”, tra “noi” e “loro”, tra “progredito” e “primitivo”. Eppure l’evoluzione, in senso stretto, non è teleologica e non c’è un “avanti” o un “indietro”, c’è solo un cambiamento causato dall’adattamento nell’ecosistema in cui l’essere storico si trova. Evoluzione non è necessariamente sinonimo di ottimizzazione (chi può dire che la “prossima generazione” sarà migliore?). La mia ipotesi è che questa metafora (linguaggio) influenza il nostro modo di concepire e ragionare circa un oggetto (pensiero). Anticipando qualche dato, mi avvalgo delle discipline linguistiche, nell’ambito delle quali si parla dell’evoluzione non solo del linguaggio, ma anche della lingua. Ad esempio l’idea che una lingua sia meno complessa sintatticamente, come nel caso della lingua dei Pirahã del Sudamerica, ha generato il giudizio di “primitivismo” nei confronti del popolo che la parla da parte soprattutto di alcuni filochomskyiani e altri1. In altre scienze sociali, alcune manifestazioni culturali, come l’arte, vengono intese come “primitive” o “moderne”, oppure si parla di evoluzione di generi letterari. La dimostrazione forse più eclatante di questo antropocentrismo riguarda il problema del genere Homo, in cui l’avvento dell’Uomo Anatomicamente Moderno si fa coincidere con la nascita della cultura, utilizzando un doppio standard di modernità, visto che Neandertal fu probabilmente molto più simile a noi di quanto si tende a pensare. L’utilizzo dell’idea di evoluzione come metafora può essere estremamente potente nell’ambiente accademico, ma occorre prestare attenzione alle sue possibili implicazioni. Il mio intento è quello di analizzare questa metafora usata comunemente all’interno delle varie discipline dal punto di vista della linguistica cognitiva (frames e metafore concettuali), mettendo in evidenza come il concetto target eredita delle implicazioni che emergono a causa delle qualità proprie del concetto source, per dimostrare che il modo in cui avviene il framing del concetto condiziona sovente la metodologia di studio, nonché la tassonomia applicata all’oggetto studiato.

Vedi anche : http://rwth-aachen.academia.edu/VitoEvola/Papers/200284/Evoluzione_cambiamento_e_progresso_Tra_metafora_e_frame