Event

EALC Colloquium

This talk will discuss two on-going projects that apply quantitative analysis to issues in the study of early Chinese religion. One project concerns the issue of the degree to which early China had a concept of mind-body dualism. The results of a series of studies, ranging from qualitative team coding to fully automated analysis, will be presented that take advantage of the fact that the Chinese textual corpus is largely digitized, allowing us to “read” it in entirely new ways. The second project concerns a massive database of religious/cultural history that is being constructed in order to subject functionalist theories of religion to more rigorous and comprehensive testing than has previously been possible, as well as allowing scholars to ask questions about cultural transmission and the contours of religious concepts and affiliations in a new way.

Edward Slingerland received a B.A. from Stanford in Asian Languages (Chinese), an M.A. from UC Berkeley in East Asian Languages (classical Chinese), and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University. His research specialties and teaching interests include Warring States (5th-3rd c. B.C.E.) Chinese thought, religious studies (comparative religion, cognitive science and evolution of religion), cognitive linguistics (blending and conceptual metaphor theory), ethics (virtue ethics, moral psychology), evolutionary psychology, the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences, and the classical Chinese language.

All members of the Penn community are welcome!