Supernatural Agents PDF Download
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Author | : Iikka Pyysiainen |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | : 300 |
Release | : 2009-04-27 |
Genre | : Religion |
ISBN | : 019970175X |
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The cognitive science of religion is a rapidly growing field whose practitioners apply insights from advances in cognitive science in order to provide a better understanding of religious impulses, beliefs, and behaviors. In this book Ilkka Pyysiäinen shows how this methodology can profitably be used in the comparative study of beliefs about superhuman agents. He begins by developing a theoretical outline of the basic, modular architecture of the human mind and especially the human capacity to understand agency. He then goes on to discuss examples of supernatural agency in detail, arguing that the human ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others forms the basis of conceptions of supernatural agents and of such social cognition in which supernatural agents are postulated as interested parties in social life. Beliefs about supernatural agency are natural, says Pyysiäinen, in the sense that such concepts are used in an intuitive and automatic fashion. Two dots and a straight line below them automatically trigger the idea of a face, for example. Given that the mind consists of a host of such modular mechanisms, certain kinds of beliefs will always have a selective advantage over others. Abstract theological concepts are usually elaborate versions of such simpler and more contagious folk conceptions. Pyysiäinen uses ethnographical and survey materials as well as doctrinal treatises to show that there are certain recurrent patterns in beliefs about supernatural agents both at the level of folk-religion and of formal theology.
Author | : Gregory Currie |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
Total Pages | : 264 |
Release | : 2010-02-18 |
Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | : 0199282609 |
Download Narratives and Narrators Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Gregory Currie offers a reflection on the nature and significance of narrative in human communication. He shows that narratives are devices for manifesting the intentions of their makers in stories, argues that human tendencies to imitation and to joint attention underlie the pleasure of narrative, and discusses authorship, character, and irony.
Author | : Benjamin Grant Purzycki |
Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing |
Total Pages | : 285 |
Release | : 2023-02-09 |
Genre | : Religion |
ISBN | : 1350265713 |
Download The Minds of Gods Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Why are humans obsessed with divine minds? What do gods know and what do they care about? What happens to us and our relationships when gods are involved? Drawing from neuroscience, evolutionary, cultural, and applied anthropology, social psychology, religious studies, philosophy, technology, and cognitive and political sciences, The Minds of Gods probes these questions from a multitude of naturalistic perspectives. Each chapter offers brief intellectual histories of their topics, summarizes current cutting-edge questions in the field, and points to areas in need of attention from future researchers. Through an innovative theoretical framework that combines evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion, this book brings together otherwise disparate literatures to focus on a topic that has comprised a lasting, central obsession of our species.
Author | : Joel Hodge |
Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing |
Total Pages | : 296 |
Release | : 2020-01-23 |
Genre | : Religion |
ISBN | : 1350104981 |
Download Violence in the Name of God Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This book traces the trajectory of militant jihadism to show how violence is more intentionally embraced as the centre of worship, social order and ideology. Undertaking an in-depth analysis of militant jihadist groups and utilising the work of René Girard, Joel Hodge argues that the extreme violence of militant jihadists is a response to modernity in two ways that have not been sufficiently explored by the existing literature. Firstly, it is a manifestation of the unrestrained and escalating state of desire and rivalry in modernity, which militant jihadists seek to counter with extreme violence. Secondly, it is a response to the unveiling and discrediting of sacred violence, which militant jihadists seek to reverse by more purposefully valorising sacred violence in what they believe to be jihad. Relevant to anyone interested in Islam, philosophy of religion, theology, and terrorism, Violence in the Name of God imagines new ways of thinking about militancy in the name of Islam in the twenty-first century.
Author | : Fraser Watts |
Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
Total Pages | : 273 |
Release | : 2014-03-20 |
Genre | : Religion |
ISBN | : 0191512443 |
Download Evolution, Religion, and Cognitive Science Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
The cognitive science of religion is an inherently heterogeneous subject, incorporating theory and data from anthropology, psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of mind amongst other subjects. One increasingly influential area of research in this field is concerned specifically with exploring the relationship between the evolution of the human mind, the evolution of culture in general, and the origins and subsequent development of religion. This research has exerted a strong influence on many areas of religious studies over the last twenty years, but, for some, the so-called 'evolutionary cognitive science of religion' remains a deeply problematic enterprise. This book's primary aim is to engage critically and constructively with this complex and diverse body of research from a wide range of perspectives. To these ends, the book brings together authors from a variety of relevant disciplines, in the thorough exploration of many of the key debates in the field. These include, for example: can certain aspects of religion be considered adaptive, or are they evolutionary by-products? Is the evolutionary cognitive science of religion compatible with theism? Is the evolutionary cognitive approach compatible with other, more traditional approaches to the study of religion? To what extent is religion shaped by cultural evolutionary processes? Is the evolutionary account of the mind that underpins the evolutionary cognitive approach the best or only available account? Written in accessible language, with an introductory chapter by Ilkka Pyssiäinen, a leading scholar in the field, this book is a valuable resource for specialists, undergraduate and graduate students, and newcomers to the evolutionary cognitive science of religion.
Author | : D. Jason Slone |
Publisher | : Routledge |
Total Pages | : 380 |
Release | : 2016-04-01 |
Genre | : Religion |
ISBN | : 1134941870 |
Download Religion and Cognition Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
The cognitive science of religion examines the mental processes that govern religious belief and behaviour. It offers a fresh and exciting approach to the scientific study of religion. 'Religion and Cognition' brings together key essays which outline the theory and illustrate this with experimental case material. The central topics in this new critical field of research are all addressed: meta-theoretical arguments for cognitive explanations of religion; theoretical models of cognition employed in the cognitive science of religion; prominent cognitive theories of religion; methods used to gather data and test theories; and experimental findings by cognitive scientists of religion.
Author | : Scott Atran |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | : 389 |
Release | : 2004-12-09 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0198034059 |
Download In Gods We Trust Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.
Author | : Stephen K. Sanderson |
Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing |
Total Pages | : 317 |
Release | : 2018-01-25 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 1350047449 |
Download Religious Evolution and the Axial Age Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Religious Evolution and the Axial Age describes and explains the evolution of religion over the past ten millennia. It shows that an overall evolutionary sequence can be observed, running from the spirit and shaman dominated religions of small-scale societies, to the archaic religions of the ancient civilizations, and then to the salvation religions of the Axial Age. Stephen K. Sanderson draws on ideas from new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories, as well as comparative religion, anthropology, history, and sociology. He argues that religion is a biological adaptation that evolved in order to solve a number of human problems, especially those concerned with existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. Much of the focus of the book is on the Axial Age, the period in the second half of the first millennium BCE that marked the greatest religious transformation in world history. The book demonstrates that, as a result of massive increases in the scale and scope of war and large-scale urbanization, the problems of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity became particularly acute. These changes evoked new religious needs, especially for salvation and release from suffering. As a result entirely new religions-Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism-arose to help people cope with the demands of the new historical era.
Author | : Lowell Gustafson |
Publisher | : Taylor & Francis |
Total Pages | : 378 |
Release | : 2022-07-05 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 1000522946 |
Download Science, Religion and Deep Time Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This book examines the meaning of religion within the scientific, evidence-based history of our known past since the big bang. While our current major religions are only centuries or millennia old, our volume discusses the origins and development of human religious practice and belief over our species’ existence of 300,000 years. The volume also connects the scientific approach to natural and social history with ancient truths of our religious ancestors using new lines of inquiry, new technologies, new modes of expression, and new concepts. It brings together insights of natural scientists, social scientists, philosophers, writers, and theologians to discuss narratives of the universe. The essays discuss that to apprehend religion scientifically, or to interpret and explain science theologically, the subject must be examined through a variety of disciplinary lenses simultaneously and raise several theoretical, philosophical, and moral problems. With a singular investigation into the meaning of religion in the context of the 13.8 billion-year history of our universe, this book will be indispensable for scholars and students of religious studies, big history, sociology and social anthropology, philosophy, and science and technology studies.
Author | : Sociological Society |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 406 |
Release | : 1907 |
Genre | : Sociology |
ISBN | : |
Download Sociological Papers ... Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle