Rationality & the Study of Religion (Acta Jutlandica Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8772886927 ISBN 13: 9788772886923

Publisher: Aarhus University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Does rationality, the intellectual bedrock of all science, apply to the study of religion? Religion, arguably the most subjective area of human behaviour, has particular challenges associated with its study. Attracting crowd-healers, conjurers, the pious and the prophetic alongside comparativists and sceptics, it excites opinions and generalisations whilst seldom explicitly staking out the territory for the discussions in which it partakes. Increasingly, scholars argue that religious study needs to define and critique its own field, and to distinguish itself from theology and other non-objective disciplines. Yet how can rational techniques be applied to beliefs and states of mind regarded by some as beyond the scope of human reason? Can these be made empirically testable, or comparable and replicable within academic communities? Can science explicate religion without reducing it to mere superstition, or redefine its truth in some empirical but meaningful way? Featuring contributions from leading international experts including Donald Wiebe, Roger Trigg and Michael Pye, Rationality and the Study of Religion gets under the surface of the religious studies discipline to expose the ideologies beneath. Reopening debate in a neglected yet philosophically significant field, it questions the role of rationality in religious anthropology, natural history and anti-scientific theologies, with implications not only for supposedly objective disciplines but for our deepest attitudes to personal experience. 'Interesting and important.

About this title

Product Description

Hard to Find book

Review

"All essays engage in critical dialogues with a wide but also varying range of past and present philosophers, philosophers of science, philosophers and scholars of religion, sociologists, cognitivists et al. and they all do so in a critical, self-critical, sober, and scientific way....I can only recommend that this volume be widely read by everyone, scholars and students, engaged in the continuous development of the scientific study of religion."
-"Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Edition details

• Publisher: Aarhus University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8772886927
• ISBN 13: 9788772886923
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200
• Editor: Jensen Jeppe Sinding, Martin Luther H