Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
April 17, 2026
Sevil Mehdilou, F Davari Dolatabadi, Masoomeh Yaghoobi
1 citation
Sacred presence in architecture is not a fixed symbolic meaning but a fragile, repeatable achievement that arises when four analytic fields—Embodied, Mnemonic, Symbolic, and Resonant—are coordinated by a cross-field operator called LUX, which organizes salience through light, shadow, and visibility. Applying this Existential Hologram model to the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan and Chartres Cathedral reveals distinct configurations: an aligned field of co-presence under LUX-as-containment in Isfahan, and a hierarchical narrative field of participation under LUX-as-solicitation in Chartres. The model offers a transparent protocol for comparative analysis focused on configurations rather than inventories of forms or doctrines.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
July 20, 2026
Xiaochen Zhao
Large language models challenge Hubert Dreyfus's claim that AI cannot match human know-how. Reinterpreting Dreyfus through Heidegger, the paper argues the key difference is not rules versus skilled coping but correlational patterning versus teleological causation. This teleological causation, called causal-intentional binding, is Dasein's future-oriented act of opening meanings for which it remains ethically responsible. Modern AI achieves contextual fluency but remains stuck in Heidegger's idle talk, lacking the binding that turns coping into conscience. The paper distinguishes two horizons: AI-as-curator, a static mirror organizing human insights, and AI-as-co-evolver, which might acquire proto-teleology through self-referential causal modeling, approaching an artificial Dasein. The consciousness debate thus shifts from embodiment to ontological directionality.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
June 30, 2026
Gan Tan, Jie Yang, Lan Cheng
Charismatic authority in the Boxer Uprising operated through three distinct types—martial-performative, bureaucratic-organizational, and mystical-gendered—each with different vulnerabilities to disconfirmation and distinct patterns of organizational collapse. An integrative 'Sacred Mobilization System' model identifies cosmological belief, ritual practice, and charismatic leadership as mutually constitutive dimensions. A process-tracing analysis disaggregates the collapse of charismatic authority into three causal paths: battlefield falsification, organizational disintegration through incomplete routinization, and the Qing court's policy reversal. The study argues that charisma is not a unitary phenomenon but a family of related phenomena with structurally distinct logics of construction, exercise, and decay.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
June 25, 2026
Liu Liu
Phenomenology concerns both real and imaginary entities, including necessary beings, hypothetical objects, possible objects, and modal properties. Because the range of potential intentional objects is vast, the total number of mental states would far exceed the number of possible physical states. This numerical excess of noema is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of supervenience, which holds that mental states depend on physical states. The argument offers an alternative to those advanced by Abelson and Porpora, rooted in the mind's capacity to think about natural numbers. The consciousness problem may require trialism rather than dualism, as necessary beings and hypothetical objects form a distinct ontological category separate from minds and physical objects.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
June 20, 2026
Zdena Kráľová, Gregor Vnučko, Gabor Pintes
A systematic review of seven studies found that contemplative practices—such as mindfulness, breathing meditation, reflective journaling, guided imagery, and dialog activities—can enhance academic achievement, classroom climate, learner motivation, resilience, and attitudes toward language learning in foreign language teaching. In several quasi-experimental studies, intervention groups improved speaking fluency and willingness to communicate compared with control groups, but results for foreign language anxiety, self-regulation, and critical thinking were inconsistent or statistically non-significant. The evidence is limited by small sample sizes (ranging from 11 to 249 participants), predominantly non-randomized designs, and methodological diversity. The review identifies significant research gaps, including no European studies and a lack of long-term or large-scale investigations.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
April 6, 2026
Xinyue Tian, Benqian Sang
Religious practices like prayer, chanting, asceticism, and meditation activate pleasure-related circuits in the brain, according to neurobiological and psychological evidence. Ascetic practices do not inherently conflict with the human tendency to seek pleasure. Religion's evolutionary adaptability allows it to sustain well-being even with low resource consumption. The paper reinterprets religious practices as a strategy of finding joy in hardship and proposes that faith may result from practice rather than cause it, with deities as peripheral institutional tools. The Ascetic Practice Model is offered as an evolutionary-friendly framework for dialogue with adaptationist and byproduct accounts.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
March 13, 2026
Bryan Kam, Isabela Granic
Neither theory nor practice alone is sufficient for personal flourishing or scientific inquiry; the two are complementary skills that can be deliberately trained and oscillated. A latent preference for abstract concepts over direct experience—termed "latent Platonism"—contributes to personal suffering and intellectual dead ends. The paper illustrates this through Type I diabetes management, where constant negotiation between abstract formulas and embodied experience is required. Five practical principles are offered: regard concepts and experience as trainable skills; commit to oscillation between them; prioritize relations and processes over objects and states; embrace trial-and-error learning; and employ conditional historicism over linear causal thinking. The framework aims to reduce suffering, enhance inquiry, and provide a pragmatic methodology for evaluating philosophical positions.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
March 12, 2026
Mengyun Wang, Quan Xu
A disposition toward awe is positively linked to international altruism—helping people in other countries—in both Chinese and American participants. In a study of 497 Chinese and 283 US adults, the relationship was mediated by different psychological pathways depending on culture. Among Chinese participants, awe boosted international altruism through both self-transcendence and identity with all humanity, operating in parallel and in sequence. Among US participants, identity with all humanity alone, and the sequence of self-transcendence then identity with all humanity, explained the link. The findings suggest that cultivating awe may foster cross-cultural goodwill, but the mechanisms differ across societies.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
September 25, 2025
S. Devadas Pillai, Hemaa Manimaran, Glenn B. Mannheim et al.
Bhāvanā, an ancient contemplative principle meaning 'bringing into being,' remains under-defined in empirical research despite its presence in classical Indian texts. This study provides the first practitioner-grounded model of Bhāvanā, based on interviews with 27 long-term practitioners of the IAM®-35 meditation practice. Using Grounded Theory methodology with open, axial, and selective coding, the authors developed the PAL framework: Prerequisites for practice, Aspects of the meditation process, and Levels of Bhāvanā experience. Participants described Bhāvanā as an immersive internal process integrating awareness, memory, and multisensory engagement, fostering transformative experiences of personal and spiritual unity. The framework bridges ancient contemplative principles with modern experiential insights.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
May 2, 2026
Bassam Khoury
Contemplative practices like mindfulness and compassion are widely available, yet collective suffering, polarization, war, and ecological harm persist. The authors argue that this gap arises from multilevel barriers: automatic threat biases and attentional capture in individuals, effortful regulatory demands of meditation, systemic processes such as norm internalization and moral disengagement, and deliberative constraints including policy design and structural inequality. They propose an Embodied and Embedded Mindfulness and Compassion Framework that maps pathways across biological regulation, relational enactment, institutional embedding, and ecological extension. Durable transformation, they contend, requires embedding these practices across all levels and aligning them with structural reform.