Taxonomy, Differentiation Processes and Metaphor in the History of Knowledge, including Religion
CERES-Palais, Raum "Ruhrpott" (4.13)
The workshop is organized by the Collaborative Research Centre 1475 (CRC 1475), and the international Multilingualism Research Group (Vienna / Oslo / Rome), represented by its speaker Velizar Sadovski and a number of its founding members and partners from Norway, Great Britain, Italy, and Switzerland.
The Center for Religious Studies (CERES) where parts of the CRC are located, and the Multilingualism Research Group (MRG) share a series of research interests. The key topics “Multilingualism” and “Listenwissenschaften”, represented in several MRG conferences between 2008 and 2024, bring additional inputs to the research themes: cognitive aspects of the relation between language and social experience; lexical and terminological differentiation and the history of knowledge; religious experience and social pragmatics in the context of ancient societies; relevance of linguistic forms of expression for the questions of social message, institutional communication and “invention of traditions” within a specific socio-political system, e.g. in the dialectic conditions of a multilingual state; social dimensions of literary genres; ways of addressing the use and misuse of languages for establishing group identities, focussing on antagonistic social groups on various levels of a society, etc.
Within this research framework, the workshop, “Taxonomy, Differentiation Processes and Metaphor in the History of Knowledge, including Religion” is designed to foster dialogue among scholars of religion and philologists. The workshop invites exploration of various captivating topics, including differentiation processes, metaphors, and taxonomies.
The keyword “differentiation” refers to the fact that, with increasing complexity, societies begin to differentiate themselves internally according to spheres such as politics, law, economics, medicine, art, and religion, each of which fulfills a specific societal function. This process ends in the modern, functionally differentiated society, but already began in the early societies of antiquity. The differentiation process finds its linguistic expression in corresponding text documents, so that the respective societal structure can be inferred from them. In this way, philology, historical linguistics, and sociology can cooperate.
