These papers explore new applications in CSR methodology and theory, with a special emphasis on questions of embodiment and agency in religion.
This paper proposes a 4E cognitive framework to analyze gender transition as a fundamental reconfiguration of the agent-environment interface. Moving beyond discursive models of performativity, I argue that gender is a primary mechanism of enactive sense-making and a key depth dimension of existential flourishing. Drawing on Tillich and Merleau-Ponty, I frame gender transition as a state of functional ease where the physical body and social position align.
Then, utilizing a Haslangerian lens, I position the body as an active participant in cognition rather than a passive substrate. Transitioning is thus an enactive resolution to existential dislocation, utilizing medical and social re-tooling to create necessary affordances for action. Finally, I characterize transgender communities as essential affective scaffolding and frame anti-trans legislation as environmental enclosure—a systematic attempt to render the world un-grippable, obstructing both the material and cognitive foundations of integrated wholeness.
This paper engages the intersection of affective neuroscience and medieval philosophical theology by comparing Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion, specifically the role of interoception, with Thomas Aquinas's account of phantasms in shaping human affect. Barrett argues that emotions are constructed concepts emerging from interoceptive bodily signals, while Aquinas argues that phantasms are sensory representations generated by the sense appetite and stored in the intellect, which enable human passions. Despite radically different metaphysical frameworks, both recognize that emotion depends on a structured interplay between body and cognition. I argue that interoception and phantasms function in both frameworks as analogous mediators in the formation of human affect, highlighting an unexpected convergence between contemporary cognitive science and Thomistic theological anthropology. This comparison underscores that insights from medieval theology can still illuminate contemporary discussions about embodiment, affect, and the nature of human emotion.
This paper analyzes CSR theories of agency attribution to supernatural agents (SAs), specifically the extent to which specific properties (psychological vs physiological) result in human-like versus nonhuman-like understandings. To test the relationship between properties and agential understanding, we analyze 40 native Tagalog (Filipino) speakers who currently reside in the Philippines. Tagalog is distinct in that it linguistically differentiates between human and nonhuman agents through case markers and determiners. It is therefore offers a productive opportunity to explore the extent to which these speakers label a given supernatural agent as human-like or not based on specific properties. In addition to using a non-WEIRD dataset and a linguistic analysis rare in the field, this study builds on recent work both analyzing Tagalog in the context of CSR and investigating the properties generally assigned to God and other SAs.
The standard model of the cognitive science of religion “puts all its eggs in the basket” of supernatural agents. This has resulted in the neglect or denial of nonpersonal and nonagentive powers and meanings with respect to magic, for both magical thinking and practice, for hunter-gatherer, ancient, and contemporary manifestations of magic. Embodied cognition offers a corrective to the standard model’s assumptions about magic. It recognizes the very obvious bodily involvement in rituals involving magic. It recognizes that not all patterns in the natural world involve conscious intention by agents and that all societies acknowledge the reality of some of those patterns. The paper analyzes imitative/sympathetic, contagious, divination, apotropaic—warding off evil, healing, transformation of status, and some Christian sacramental rituals. It evidences the highly significant role that magic rituals enlisting nonpersonal and nonagentive processes have played in religions through the ages.