Chasing Down Religion - In the Sights of History and the Cognitive Sciences - Panayotis Pachis
Recovering 'Religious Experience' in the Explanation of Religion
Chasing Down Religion - In the Sights of History and the Cognitive Sciences - Panayotis Pachis
Donald Wiebe [+]
University of Toronto
Donald Wiebe is Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Trinity College at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Religion and Truth: Towards and Alternative Paradigm for the Study of Religion (De Gruyter, 1981), The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), Beyond Legitimation: Essays on the Problem of Religious Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) and The Learned Practice of Religion in the Modern University (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Description
Donald Wiebe has two aims in this essay. First to provide an account of the emergence and development of that theory from two methodological innovations Lewis-Williams brought to the field of rock art studies that not only made possible a more sophisticated interpretation of the artistic creations of the San (and our more distant forebears), but also revealed the essential character of their art as expressions of the religious beliefs they held. He will then show how those beliefs are intimately tied to what we commonly conceive of as “religious experience”.