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 by March 30 to neuhums@gmail.com