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About the Journal
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (ESIC) publishes scholarly and scientific articles on every aspect of imaginative culture: literature, film, theater, television, music, ideology, religion, politics, the visual arts, and digital media. Contributors to ESIC also review books from all fields of the evolutionary sciences and humanities. The journal aims to help researchers stay informed about the newest thinking in the broad range of disciplines that converge on imaginative culture. Articles are written in English, but subject matter can include works from any language and any historical period.
 In what ways can the psychedelic imagination be “transformative”? The science of psychedelics is having a renaissance currently and the research is helping us understand the mind better and provide us with fresh therapeutic options. Psychotropic substances engender psychological and philosophical states that reveal important features of the self and consciousness. They can reduce the vigilant executive functions in the frontal areas of the brain and release the mind into the involuntary sphere of free-association and mind-wandering (what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network, DMN). These altered states loosen the tyranny of task-based consciousness, and they also suspend the ego’s usual dominance –letting us feel connected to everything (possibly activating improved empathy). |
 Firstly, how are we to make sense of the apparent popularity of dad jokes given that they are explicitly said to be “unfunny”? Millions of people seek them out and share them avidly with each other on websites like Twitter and Reddit. What gives? Are dad jokes funny, unfunny, or somehow both? Secondly, what are we to make of the association between dads and dad jokes? One possible answer is that dad jokes are simply bad jokes and that dads have a bad sense of humor, but I argue against this interpretation in my new paper for this journal, “Dad Jokes and the Deep Roots of Fatherly Teasing.” Dad jokes might seem like a strange topic for a journal called Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, but to understand the dad joke I argue that we have to look at the deep roots of each of its constituent concepts, dads and jokes. In this post, I will walk you through my central argument. |
 An embodied contradiction: Some personal reflections on the use of 4E perspectives in the humanities
If the personal history behind a research article is sometimes useful to have, its value is less obvious for a review article. Reviewers, after all, should be objective, and even if this can never realistically be achieved, it still seems a little shameless to parade the deficiency. I do so here because I think that the different ways in which I have encountered 4E perspectives illustrate some tensions in the practice of 4E that are usually invisible in the academic literature. These tensions are important because they illustrate how the presentation of 4E as a radical intellectual program by humanities scholars (though not only them) can run ahead of the more prosaic reality of actual 4E research. Should my experiences not chime with those of others who have worked in 4E, I can only remind them that they have foresworn disembodied objectivity on a priori grounds, and thus have no claim against the reviewer who fails to exhibit it. |