CfP: Edited volume: Philosophy, Cognition, and Archaeology

This edited volume aims to gather philosophers, archaeologists, and psychologists/cognitive scientists working at the intersection of paleoanthropology, cognitive archaeology, psychology, and philosophy of mind and cognition. Some of the topics that we are interested in:

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• 4E cognition and cognitive archaeology: in what sense archaeological data and cross-linguistic data about ancient hominins can help us understand human cognition or advance our current theories and assumptions pertaining to cognition, such as 4E cognition?
• The origin and nature of higher cognitive processes: to what extent can the considerations in the evolution of linguistic competence, numerical cognition, abstraction, and normativity inform current or historical philosophical debates in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, or epistemology (and vice versa)?
• The evolutionary history of skilled technical cognition: can we draw lessons from the evolutionary history of technical cognition and ancient hominin practices such as stone knapping for the current research on cognitive mechanisms underlying expertise or philosophical accounts of knowledge-how?
• Intergenerational transmission and remembrance: how does the transfer of knowledge and memories shape lives of ancient hominins, and to what extent such transmission could be relevant for our culture(s) of remembrance?
• Links between cognitive archaeology and evolutionary psychology: are these two research programs similar, and can they be used coextensively, or the former scientific field manages to bypass some of the pitfalls of the latter that philosophers noticed in the 1990s?
• The status of evidence and the types of inference used in cognitive archaeology: what are the limitations of the descriptive pattern analysis, i.e., analysis of ancient tools in terms of their contemporary cognitive significance? What archaeological evidence can be deemed “good enough” to allow inferential leaps from the e.g., lower paleolithic to our times? Should we consider subdetermination as a pressing issue in cognitive archaeology?
• Ideational cognitive archaeology: is it feasible to extract from archaeological data how ideologies, rituals, and systems of beliefs affected ancient hominins and their formation of cognitive maps so that archaeologists’ own cultural milieu does not sully the interpretation of artefacts?

The volume is published by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, and is partially sponsored through the Sciences of Origin project that received funding from the University of Oxford (project New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe) and the Templeton Foundation.

The selection procedure is the following:

⎯ A 750-word abstract (in docx or doc format) with up to 5 keywords and a short CV (up to 2 pages) should be sent to sciencesoftheorigin@gmail.com

⎯ The authors whose abstracts are accepted for the edited volume will be contacted. They are expected to send a paper of no more than 6000 words (in docx or doc format) to sciencesoftheorigin@gmail.com


⎯ The authors will receive reviewers’ comments after which they will have 3 weeks to send revised papers to be published.

We strongly encourage submissions from underrepresented groups, so please indicate in the email body whether you belong to one.

Submission deadline for abstracts: 5th July

Submission deadline for papers: 1st October

Should you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact us.