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1 - Introduction

Gabriel Levy
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
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Summary

The body is still the elephant in the room for disciplines in the humanities such as religious studies. Scholars have written books on the representations of religious bodies, and pay lip service to the idea that there are living and breathing human beings to which such religious systems ultimately refer. But unfortunately scholarship has not been able to cross the chasm that separates representation from reality. I would never argue that science crosses this chasm either, but I do think it gives us some tools to talk about bodies in new and relevant ways.

This book is about how technologies of literacy interact with bodies and minds over time. Pointing to literacy as a decisive shift in religious history is not a completely new idea, but integrating that shift with vocabulary from the mind sciences is. The book thus builds a hybrid form of humanities scholarship that incorporates vocabulary and states of art from the harder sciences.

Both biological and religious systems are dynamic. They are constantly changing and developing in relation to one another. I view the relation between them much the same as the relationship between genotype and phenotype, between the genetic “code” and how the code is expressed. The case has recently been made by Day (2007) that the anomalous relation between genotype and phenotype parallels the anomalous relation between neurons and mental states.

Type
Chapter
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Judaic Technologies of the Word
A Cognitive Analysis of Jewish Cultural Formation
, pp. 1 - 26
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2012

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  • Introduction
  • Gabriel Levy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Book: Judaic Technologies of the Word
  • Online publication: 05 April 2014
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  • Introduction
  • Gabriel Levy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Book: Judaic Technologies of the Word
  • Online publication: 05 April 2014
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Gabriel Levy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Book: Judaic Technologies of the Word
  • Online publication: 05 April 2014
Available formats
×