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This monograph makes a case for a cognitive turn in New Testament Studies, both surveying relevant developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion and digging into the field of cognitive and behavioral sciences in search of opportunities of gaining new insights about biblical materials. Over the last few decades, our knowledge of how the human mind and brain work increased dramatically. We can now understand religious traditions, rituals, and visionary experiences in novel ways. This has implications for the study of the New Testament and early Christianity. With insights from cognitive science, we can better understand how people in the ancient Mediterranean world remembered sayings and stories, what they experienced when participating in rituals, how they thought about magic and miracle, and how they felt and reasoned about moral questions. The first three chapters of the book introduce the contemporary study of religion in the framework of evolution, culture, and cognition. In subsequent chapters, the study of the New Testament and early Christianity is reconsidered in light of the cognitive approach, including the formation of gospel traditions, the origins and function of rituals and sacraments, religious experience, ethics and moral norms, as well as the expansion of the Christian movement. In addition to rethinking old questions from a novel perspective, the book also shows how new research questions emerge from the cognitive approach, such as the connection between magic and miracle, the neurological correlates of visionary experiences, and the interaction between social network dynamics and theological development.

The rise of early Christianity has been examined from a myriad of perspectives, but until recently ritual has been a neglected topic. This book argues that ritual theory is indispensable for the study of Christian beginnings. It also makes a strong case for the application of theories and insights from the Cognitive Science of Religion, a field that has established itself as a vigorous movement in Religious Studies over the past two decades. The book develops a ‘socio-cognitive’ approach to the study of early Christian rituals, seeking to integrate a social-level analysis with findings from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. Ritual and Christian Beginnings provides an overview of how ritual has been approached in previous scholarship, including reasons for its neglect, and introduces the reader to the emerging fields of Ritual Studies and the Cognitive Science of Religion. In particular, it explores the ways in which cognitive theories of ritual can shed new light on issues discussed by early Christian scholars, and opens up new questions and avenues for further research. The socio-cognitive approach to ritual is applied to a number of test cases, including John the Baptist, the ritual healing practised by Jesus and the early Christians, the social life of Pauline Christianity, and the development of early Christian baptismal practices. The analysis creates building blocks for a new account of Christian beginnings, highlighting the role of ritual innovation, cooperative signalling, and the importance of bodily actions for the generation and transmission of religious knowledge.

Understanding the nature and the structure of human language coincides with capturing the constraints which make a conceivable language possible or, equivalently, with discovering whether there can be any impossible languages at all. This book explores these related issues, paralleling the effort of a biologist who attempts at describing the class of impossible animals. In biology, one can appeal for example to physical laws of nature (such as entropy or gravity) but when it comes to language the path becomes intricate and difficult for the physical laws cannot be exploited. In linguistics, in fact, there are two distinct empirical domains to explore: on the one hand, the formal domain of syntax, where different languages are compared trying to understand how much they can differ; on the other, the neurobiological domain, where the flow of information through the complex neural networks and the electric code exploited by neurons is uncovered and measured. By referring to the most advanced experiments in Neurolinguistics the book in fact offers an updated descriptions of modern linguistics and allows the reader to formulate new and surprising questions. Moreover, since syntax - the capacity to generate novel structures (sentences) by recombining a finite set of elements (words) - is the fingerprint of all and only human languages this books ultimately deals with the fundamental questions which characterize the search for our origins.

In his work, the philosopher John Haugeland (1945–2010) proposed a radical expansion of philosophy’s conceptual toolkit, calling for a wider range of resources for understanding the mind, the world, and how they relate. Haugeland argued that “giving a damn” is essential for having a mind, and suggested that traditional approaches to cognitive science mistakenly overlook the relevance of caring to the understanding of mindedness. Haugeland’s determination to expand philosophy’s array of concepts led him to write on a wide variety of subjects that may seem unrelated—from topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to examinations of such figures as Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and Thomas Kuhn. Haugeland’s two books with the MIT Press, Artificial Intelligence and Mind Design, show the range of his interests. This book offers a collection of essays in conversation with Haugeland’s work. The essays, by prominent scholars, extend Haugeland’s work on a range of contemporary topics in philosophy of mind—from questions about intentionality to issues concerning objectivity and truth to the work of Heidegger. Giving a Damn also includes a previously unpublished paper by Haugeland, “Two Dogmas of Rationalism,” as well as critical responses to it. Finally, an appendix offers Haugeland’s outline of Kant’s "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.”

Many firms want to innovate, but have a hard time overcoming their corporate culture to allow them to develop and commercialize innovative ideas. This book brings together contributions from academics and people in the business community to explore methods for opening up the innovation process to make it more successful. The book starts by defining the concept of open innovation. Then, it examines ways to bring more people into the innovation process at all stages including idea development, evaluation, and commercialization. This work provides a current perspective on the state-of-the-art in open innovation.

Repetition is stunningly pervasive in music from all over the world. People often place their music players “on repeat”—relistening to the same recordings again and again. The prevalence of this practice suggests the existence of some sort of underlying psychological principle; however, people have been slow to acknowledge and study music’s repetitiveness, finding it an embarrassing or suspicious practice. This book argues that repetitiveness lies at the core of musical experience, and adopts the perspective of cognitive science to examine the puzzle of this human appetite for musical repetition. Work on subjects as diverse as the structure of bird song, the psychology of ritual, the nature of infant-directed speech, the neural basis of hearing, and pathologies of repetitiveness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder are marshaled to shed light on the everyday behavior of repetitive music listening. This perspective draws new distinctions between music and language as communicative forms, and offers new ideas about the cognitive basis of musical pleasure.