JOURNAL ARTICLES

& Book Chapters

 

Mind-Body Dualism

Is Theory of Mind (ToM)—the tendency to project agency, intentionality, psychological states onto others—a human cognitive universal? Do we find ToM and mind-body folk dualism in early China, which is often characterized as being “holistic”? Is ToM centrally linked to religious cognition?

These questions are the focus of several journal articles and book chapters over the years. A grant from the University of Oxford’s Centre for Religion, Theology and Cognition also allowed me to develop a novel technique for exploring the question of mind-body dualism in early China using large-scale textual corpus sampling and independent coding (Slingerland and Chudek 2011a), and colleagues and I later explored the use of fully automated text analysis techniques to explore early Chinese mind-body concepts (Slingerland et al 2017 JAAR).

The issue of mind-body conceptions in early China is topic of my 2013 article “Body and Mind in Early China,” as well as my latest monograph, Mind and Body in Early China (2019).

Asterisks indicate refereed publications; sole-authored unless otherwise indicated.

Featured

Thornton, Mark, Sarah Wolf, Brian Reilly, Edward Slingerland and Diana Tamir. “The 3d Mind Model characterizes how people understand mental states across modern and historical cultures,” Affective Science 1-12 (January 22, 2022).

Nielbo, Kristoffer, Ryan Nichols and Edward Slingerland. “Mining Past Minds: Data-Intensive Knowledge Discovery in the Study of Historical Textual Traditions,” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 3:1-2: 93-118 (2018). *

Slingerland, Edward, Ryan Nichols, Kristoffer Nielbo and Carson Logan. “The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China,” (PDF) Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85.4: 985–1016 (2017). *

“Body and Mind in Early China: An Integrated Humanities-Science Approach,” (PDF) Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81.1: 6-55 (March 2013). *

JAAR #43 most-read article as of August 2016

Portions to be reprinted in “China as the Radical “Other”: Lessons for the Cognitive Science of Religion,” in Is Religion Natural? The Chinese Challenge, ed. Ryan Hornbeck, Elizabeth Seiver and Justin Barrett (Forthcoming)

Modified version reprinted as “Interdisciplinary Methods in Chinese Philosophy: Comparative Philosophy and the Case Example of Mind- Body Holism,” in Research Handbook on Methodology in Chinese Philosophy, ed. Sor Hoon Tan, pp. 323-351. London: Bloomsbury (2016).

“Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures,” (PDF) in Creating Consilience, Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, 74-87. New York: Oxford University Press (2012). *

Slingerland, Edward and Maciej Chudek. “The Challenges of Qualitatively Coding Ancient Texts,” (PDF) Cognitive Science 36.2: 183-186 (March 2012). *

Slingerland, Edward and Maciej Chudek. “The Prevalence of Folk Dualism in Early China,” (PDF) Cognitive Science 35: 997-1007 (Summer 2011). *

A report of a new technique for performing large-scale qualitative analysis of historical texts, with response to critics.

“Neuroscience, Theory of Mind and the Status of Human-Level Truth,” in Neuroscience and Religion: Brain, Mind, Self and Soul, ed. Volney Gay, 67-108. New York: Lexington Books, 2009.