Vol. 17, n.1 - The interdisciplinary language of science, philosophy and religious studies

2022-06-18

Call for papers - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio www.rifl.unical.it

The interdisciplinary language of science, philosophy and religious studies

Vol. 17, N. 1/2023

Edited by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti and Ivan Colagè

Submission deadline: February 15th, 2023

Publication date: June 2023

Contemporary culture highly fosters interdisciplinary work, but less attention is given to “the language” required for such an enterprise to be successful. Each discipline and research field has its own language and is thought to have all the necessary semantic resources for its work and development. For this reason, translation from the language used within a specific research field into another is not an easy task.

This task is quite challenging when interdisciplinary studies concerns mutual relationships between the natural and the human sciences, or, also, when one tries to tackle philosophical questions raised from scientific research. At times, interdisciplinary work on nature and its laws extends as far as to including natural theology and religious studies. In the last decades, this perspective gave rise to a new research field called “Science and Religion Studies” (sometimes indicated also “science & faith” or “science & theology”). Here the ambition is to let disciplines as far as the natural sciences, philosophy and religious studies mutually interact in a creative way, in order to achieve a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of nature in all its facets and dimensions.

In such studies, reflection on language turns out to be strategic. Scientific language, for instance, makes use of implicit philosophical concepts, and the same terms may have very different senses and implications in different fields. What our language indicates as “the whole”, has different meanings in the sciences, in philosophy, and in theology, where it is labelled, respectively, as the “cosmos”, the “world”, or understood as “creation”. Even the notion of God is sometimes called into debate by scientists, questioning what philosophy and theology might say on that. Here the language discovers its own limits. In the study of reality and its foundations, the role of metaphors, images, analogies, narrations and even that of poetical elements, is then explored.

The present issue of RIFL, then, intends to offer a qualified place to reflect upon the conditions and properties which render a language adequate for hosting interdisciplinary topics which involve science, philosophy and religious studies. Promoting the study on this wide and appealing subject-matter, this issue of RIFL calls for papers dealing with, but not limited to, the following topics:

  1. Philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of scientific language
  2. The role of analogy in scientific discovery and formulations
  3. Self-consistency of scientific language and its semantic openness
  4. The use of metaphors and images in science, and the strength of narrative language in science, philosophy and religion
  5. Polysemy and vagueness in interdisciplinary dialogue between religion and science
  6. The search for an effective language in science popularization
  7. Mythos and Logos in the discourse on God
  8. Apophatic language in science, philosophy and theology
  9. Keywords of interdisciplinary dialogue (e.g. nature, infinity, beauty, space-time, order, etc.): their import and implications

We call for articles in Italian, English and French. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be edited using the template at this link: http://rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc.

All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text.

The contribution must have a maximum length of 40,000 characters, including bibliography and footnotes, and be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com.