The Human Specificity: Tools, Symbols and Culture among Neuroscience, Philosophical Anthropology and the Religious Attitude towards Creation

Cognitive neuro-scientific studies are more and more unveiling the details of many human faculties and their neural substrates. As a result, the issue of the human specificity is reaching a central stage in scientific research. The underlying working hypothesis of our research project is that genuinely cultural dynamics may affect human brain architecture and connectivity also at the purely ontogenetic level, thus supporting a non-reductive understanding of the relationship and interaction between the biological/neural and the cultural dimensions. Neuro-cognitive processes underlying written language (inquired from the so-called neural-reuse perspective) seem particularly promising from this standpoint. Such a research, and its possible consequences for understanding culture, also has implications for theological tenets concerning the doctrine of 'imago dei', the eschatological future of humanity, and the idea of humanity as partaking to God's continual creation. The project foresees the organization of several 3-day research meetings and a larger international workshop. The publication of theoretical papers will present our results to the academic community.