Current approaches in the cognitive science of religion
This cognitive study of religion challenges the supernatural views of religion and the view that psychological theories are irrelevant for the understanding of religion as a cultural system. It is the interplay between the two that creates religion as a phenomenon.
277 p. : il. ; 24 cm
9780826457097, 9780826457103, 0826457096, 082645710X
912424520
Pascal Boyer - why do gods and spirits matter at all? supernatural gadgets and social mind adaptations; Ilkka Pyysiainen - religion and the counter-intuitive; Justin L. Barrett - dumb gods, petitionary prayer, and the cognitive science of religion; Stewart Guthrie - animal animism: evolutionary roots of religious cognition; Pertti Saariluoma - does classification explicate the contents of concepts?; E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley - cognitive constraints on religious ritual form - a theory of participants' competence with religious systems; Harvey Whitehouse - implicit and explicit knowledge in the domain of ritual; Jeppe Sinding Jensen - the complex worlds of religion - connecting cultural and cognitive analysis; Veikko Anttonen - identifying the generative mechanisms of religion - the issue of origin revisited; Jesper Sorensen - "the morphology and function of magic" revisited; Matti Kamppinen - explaining religion - cognitive and evolutionary mechanisms.