Areas of Concentration and Research Themes

Culture has been a distinctive form of organisation for human beings across millennia and everywhere on this planet. Language mediates both culture and the mind and the work performed at the Centre will take the shape of bringing together these diverse strands of human cognitive becoming. Research projects that will be undertaken at the Centre may include:

• embodiment and the relevance of the human body as an ultimate ground for cognition, including art practices, aesthetic experience, language and conceptualization;
• art (in the form of dance, literature, music, skilled performance, theatre) as a gateway to the study of the mind and human cognitive processes at a theoretical and/or empirical level;
• questions relating to the contribution of scientific methods to explaining both the aesthetic response (reception) and the artistic impulse (creativity);
• conceptual, intentional, and emotional dimensions of art, manifested as they are in artistic creativity, reception and appreciation;
• the socially and intersubjectively constituted nature of human linguistic competence and meaning construal;
• the role of the humanities, particularly narrative study and linguistic conceptualization or metaphor usage, for doctor/patient interactions and the experience of illness, disability or the end of life.