The Western Epistemic Tradition and the Scientific Study of Religion - Donald Wiebe
From Myth to Proto-Science: A Transformational Turning Point in the History of Human Thought
The Western Epistemic Tradition and the Scientific Study of Religion - Donald Wiebe
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
There is significant agreement among philosophers and historians that social, economic, and political conditions in ancient Greece made possible the emergence of a new, non-mythical, mode of thought. The philosophy of the pre-Socratic cosmologists from the Milesians to the atomists gave birth to a new cultural value of knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone that made possible the eventual emergence of modern scientific thinking.