Thanks to the funding of the Mind and Life Institute (Mind and Life Contemplative Studies Fellowships; MLCSF), we offer one (1) post‐Doctoral Fellowship to perform research concerning the philosophy and neurophysiology of religious experience.
The successful candidate will join a team of philosophers and neuroscientists working on a one year project entitled Philosophical and historical accounts for the neuroscientific investigation of human spirituality, at the University of Udine, Italy.
The general aim of the project is to reach a comprehensive definition of the concept of spirituality,and a scientifically grounded operationalization of the observable behaviors that are related to it. The group aims to develop a specific implicit association test (IAT) for the evaluation of how people attribute spirituality adjectives to the self. It will use a self‐other referential task in which self‐ and other‐related adjectives will be categorized, and a spiritual‐non spiritual categorization of another set of adjectives will be attempted. A crucial part of the development of the IAT for Spirituality will be to identify the appropriate adjectives to be used at the extreme of spiritual‐non spiritual dimensions. It will then be tested whether changes of implicit measures of spirituality may be rapidly induced in healthy individuals by modifying plasticity of specific brain regions via neurostimulation techniques (such as rTMS).
The neuroscientific study of spirituality opens two main philosophical problems. The first problem is that empirical explanations need to be clear about what are the mental items which they intend to explain: defining the mental, its features and its borders, though, is a philosophical enterprise, which requires a critical outlook about the meaning of words such as “mind”, “spirit”, “perception”, “experience”, “knowledge”, “reality”. The task of philosophy, then, is to offer an internal collaboration to scientific research, by helping it to identify and determine the features of its object. The second philosophical problem is that, depending on how the mental is defined, it might turn out that it is not wholly passible of an empirical explanation; in that case, it must be considered which features of the mental can be empirically explained, and which cannot; furthermore and consequently, empirical explanations must be epistemically assessed in terms of the limitations they have because of what they leave out. The second task of philosophy, then, is to offer an external assessment of the significance of empirical findings, by locating them within its all‐encompassing account of human experience.
The person joining the team will have a strong background in the philosophy of mind and in the philosophy of science or epistemology, and a demonstrated interested in the neurosciences and the philosophy of religion. She/he will join the neuroscientists in their lab work, and offer constructive, philosophical analyses of the assumption of their procedures and models. She/he will also report to the team of philosophers and work on a philosophically meaningful operationalisation of empirically testable variables.
Candidates should send the following material via email by
September 15th 2010
to both the addresses: gabriele.deanna (at) uniud.it and cosimo.urgesi (at) uniud.it:
- 1500 words statement of purposes stating their background on philosophy of mind,philosophy of science or epistemology, neurosciences, and philosophy of religion.
- full CV
- One published article, possibly on a topic related to the project
- two letters of reference.
