Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud / Edition 1

by J. Samuel Preus

Overview

J. Samuel Preus traces the development and articulation of a modern "naturalistic" approach to the study of religion by examining ideas about the origin of religion in the works of nine western thinkers: Jean Bodin, Herbert of Cherbury, Bernard Fontenelle, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, Auguste Comte, Edward Brunett Tylor, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. He argues that beginning in the sixteenth century increasing critical detachment from theological presuppositions and commitments made it possible for the question of origins to be posed from an altogether non-religious point of view. This new modernist paradigm was characterized by the conviction that religion could be explained in scientific terms, like any other object of critical investigation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780788503214
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	12/28/1996
Series:	AAR Texts and Translations Series , #16
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Note on References	viii
	Introduction	ix
Part I	Religion As a Problem
1	Conflict, Contradiction, and Impasse: Jean Bodin	3
Part II	Rationalist Versus Historical Approaches
2	The Deist Option: Herbert of Cherbury	23
3	Demythologizing Religious History: Bernard Fontenelle	40
Part III	A Science of Religion?
4	A "New Science" of Providence: Giambattista Vico	59
5	Religion within the Limits of "The Science of Man": David Hume	84
Part IV	The Progress of Reason and the Survival of Religion
6	Inventing Sociology: Auguste Comte	107
7	Evolutionary Anthropology: Edward Burnett Tylor	131
Part V	Religion Explained
8	Sociogenic Theory: Emile Durkheim	157
9	Psychogenic Theory: Sigmund Freud	178
	Conclusion	205
	Bibliography	213
	Index	227