The Western Epistemic Tradition and the Scientific Study of Religion - Donald Wiebe
The Rise and Decline of the Sciences in the Hellenistic Period
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
A brief account is provided of the advancement of ‘science-like’ thinking in the Hellenistic period which, in religio-cultural rather than political terms, stretches from the death of Alexander the Great to the decrees of Theodosius in the last decades of the fourth century of the Common Era. This overview will show why the argument whether Aristotle and his successors, or the pre-Socratics before them, gave birth to science is misleading.