The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine critically and discuss the role of imagination in science and religion, with particular emphasis on its possible epistemic, creative, and meaning-making functions. In order to answer my research questions, I apply theories and concepts from contemporary philosophy of mind on scientific and religious practices. This framework allows me to explore the mental state of imagination, not as an isolated phenomenon but, rather, as one of many mental states that co-exist and interplay (...) in our cogntive architecture. Based on the philosophical discourse of philosophy of mind, four types of imagination are indentified and conceptualized: sensory, propositional, experiential, and creative imagination. These categories are then employed on five phenomena that can be found in scientific and religious environments: metaphors, models, thought experiments, aspect perception, and - in the religious case - rituals. In relation to the concept of religious "seeing" I consider how imaginings may influence visionary experiences and visualization, and compare these phenomena with cases of scientific visualization and eureka experiences. In regard to scientific and religious models, a distinction is made between, on the one hand, two notions of truth and, on the other hand, truth-independent meaning-making. In light of these categories, I differentiate between, and critically discuss, the use of imagination in doxastic, non-doxastic and fictionalist accounts. In light of this investigation, I formulate and defend the position of interactivism, which acknowledges a constant interplay between different attitudes and mental states. In my examination of rituals and scientific and religious thought experiments, special attention is given to the mental capacity to recreate the experiences that are entailed in an imagined scenario. At the end of the investigation, I consider the possible impact that my study might have on how we view science and religion as well as the dialogue bewteen these two fields. (shrink)

To understand the history of Advaita Vedānta and its rise to prominence, we need to devote more attention to what might be termed “Greater Advaita Vedānta,” or Advaita Vedānta as expressed outside the standard canon of Sanskrit philosophical works. Elsewhere I have examined the works of Niścaldās (ca. 1791–1863), whose Hindi-language Vicār-sāgar (“The Ocean of Inquiry”) was once referred to by Swami Vivekananda as the most influential book of its day. In this paper, I look back to one of Niścaldās’s (...) major influences: Sundardās (1596–1689), a well-known Hindi poet and a direct disciple of Dādū Dayāl (d. 1604). Sundardās is typically classified as a bhakti poet rather than an Advaita Vedāntin; certainly he is not included in existing surveys or histories of Vedānta. In his youth, however, he studied Sanskrit and Vedānta in Banaras, and his poems present us with a mind that found no contradiction in claiming Dādū as his master and at the same time embracing the teachings of Advaita Vedānta. I argue that not only should Sundardās be included in histories of Advaita Vedānta, he should be credited for his originality: not only did he “Vedānticize” the Dādū Panth, he “Dādūized” Vedānta. I conclude by comparing Sundardās to two Sanskrit intellectuals from roughly the same period: Mahādeva Sarasvatī Vedāntin and Annambhaṭṭa, both of whom, like Sundardās, had commitments to Advaita Vedānta as well as to other intellectual traditions. (shrink)

To understand the history of Advaita Vedānta and its rise to prominence, we need to devote more attention to what might be termed “Greater Advaita Vedānta,” or Advaita Vedānta as expressed outside the standard canon of Sanskrit philosophical works. Elsewhere I have examined the works of Niścaldās, whose Hindi-language Vicār-sāgar was once referred to by Swami Vivekananda as the most influential book of its day. In this paper, I look back to one of Niścaldās’s major influences: Sundardās, a well-known Hindi (...) poet and a direct disciple of Dādū Dayāl. Sundardās is typically classified as a bhakti poet rather than an Advaita Vedāntin; certainly he is not included in existing surveys or histories of Vedānta. In his youth, however, he studied Sanskrit and Vedānta in Banaras, and his poems present us with a mind that found no contradiction in claiming Dādū as his master and at the same time embracing the teachings of Advaita Vedānta. I argue that not only should Sundardās be included in histories of Advaita Vedānta, he should be credited for his originality: not only did he “Vedānticize” the Dādū Panth, he “Dādūized” Vedānta. I conclude by comparing Sundardās to two Sanskrit intellectuals from roughly the same period: Mahādeva Sarasvatī Vedāntin and Annambhaṭṭa, both of whom, like Sundardās, had commitments to Advaita Vedānta as well as to other intellectual traditions. (shrink)

To understand the history of Advaita Vedānta and its rise to prominence, we need to devote more attention to what might be termed “Greater Advaita Vedānta,” or Advaita Vedānta as expressed outside the standard canon of Sanskrit philosophical works. Elsewhere I have examined the works of Niścaldās, whose Hindi-language Vicār-sāgar was once referred to by Swami Vivekananda as the most influential book of its day. In this paper, I look back to one of Niścaldās’s major influences: Sundardās, a well-known Hindi (...) poet and a direct disciple of Dādū Dayāl. Sundardās is typically classified as a bhakti poet rather than an Advaita Vedāntin; certainly he is not included in existing surveys or histories of Vedānta. In his youth, however, he studied Sanskrit and Vedānta in Banaras, and his poems present us with a mind that found no contradiction in claiming Dādū as his master and at the same time embracing the teachings of Advaita Vedānta. I argue that not only should Sundardās be included in histories of Advaita Vedānta, he should be credited for his originality: not only did he “Vedānticize” the Dādū Panth, he “Dādūized” Vedānta. I conclude by comparing Sundardās to two Sanskrit intellectuals from roughly the same period: Mahādeva Sarasvatī Vedāntin and Annambhaṭṭa, both of whom, like Sundardās, had commitments to Advaita Vedānta as well as to other intellectual traditions. (shrink)

Violence may be productively understood as a secularized theological concept. Doing so challenges claims that secularism is necessary to prevent religious violence, and it also challenges claims for a Christian triumphalist alternative. William Cavanaugh’s embrace of such a triumphalism is called into question when his genealogical method is interrogated in light of the Foucaultian genealogical project.

Ayudha Puja, a South Indian festival translated as “worship of the machines,” is a dramatic example of how religion and science intertwine in political life. Across South India, but especially in the state of Karnataka, scientists and engineers celebrate the festival in offices, laboratories, and workshops by attending a puja led by a priest. Although the festival is noteworthy in many ways, one of its most immediate valences is political. In this article, we argue that Ayudha Puja normalizes Brahminical Hinduism (...) within scientific culture through the inclusion of non-Hindus and through scientists' description of the festival as “cultural” rather than “religious.”. (shrink)

During the last decades of the 20th century, Western philosophy saw a renewed interest in religion, often referred to as ‘the return of religion’. At about the same time, a growing number of anthro...

There has been increasing interest in the evolutionary study of religion, but perfunctory fractionalization has limited our ability to explain how and why religion evolved, evaluate religion’s current adaptive value, and assess its role in contemporary decision-making. To move beyond piecemeal analyses of religion, I have recently offered an integrative evolutionary framework that approaches religions as adaptive systems. I argue that religions are an adaptive complex of traits consisting of cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioral, and developmental features that are organized into (...) a self-regulating feedback system. Here I explore four advantages of this systemic approach to religion: it avoids definitional problems that have plagued the study of religion, affords a contextual understanding of religious belief, informs current debates within the evolutionary study of religion, and provides links to both the natural sciences and humanities. I argue that the systemic approach offers the strongest potential for real progress and broad application of evolutionary theory to the study of religion. (shrink)

The article discusses the connection between theory formation and historical research in the study of religion. It presupposes that the study of religion is conceived of as an empirical discipline. The empirical basis of theories is provided primarily by historical research, including research in the very recent past, that is, the present time. Research in the history of religions, therefore, is an indispensable part of the study of religion. However, in recent discussions on the methods, aims, and theoretical presuppositions of (...) the discipline, research in the history of religions largely is ignored. To shed some light on this blind spot, the article builds on the philosophy of science of Critical Realism. While the first part deals with the role of historical research in theoretical discourses of the discipline, the second part explains fundamental ontological and epistemological positions of Critical Realism and their implications for empirical research. On this basis, some methodological problems of theory formation in the study of religion are discussed in the third part. In particular, it is argued that it is impossible to validate empirically theories of religion that aim to explain what religion is. The concluding part sketches ways of theory formation in the study of religion that does not take religion as the explanandum but as the theoretical perspective that guides research. (shrink)

Schmitt’s theologisation of sovereignty has been subjected, 50 years later, to a ‘quarter turn’ by Foucault’s move from issues of domination to issues of government. After a further 30 years, radicalising Foucault, Agamben’s archaeology of economy adds another ‘quarter turn’: the structure that emerges once the old European conjugality of facticity and validity, of praxis and being, emptied of all bonds, links, and loops, gives way to the bare opposition ‘bipolarity’. The new constellation provides the old legal-theoretical problem of rules (...) unsuspended from a ruler who would authorise them, with a new, unexpected, political content and with a change of epistemic paradigm. (shrink)

Russell McCutcheon is one of the foremost proponents of what he calls “the critical study of religion,” that is, the shift to reflect critically on the concepts used in the academic study of religion, who invented them, and why. The critical study of religion leads to the realization that the concepts with which we think were invented by particular people, at a particular historical location, for a particular purpose. What are the philosophical implications of this? McCutcheon defends a debunking or (...) non-realist answer and contrasts this with my realist approach, and he is right to do so. This paper argues that those involved in the critical study of religion therefore face a choice between a non-realist and a realist metaphysics, that McCutcheon’s arguments against realism fail, and that those who wish to offer any kind of materialist account in which religious social structures shape human agency and subjectivity should adopt a critical study of religion that is also realist. (shrink)

This paper will explore the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an exemplar of political mythmaking, a genre of narrative designed to channel and thereby to quell social anxiety and to orient select groups toward desirable beliefs and practices. One of the Declaration’s most fundamental and forceful elements is its enshrinement of the “inherent dignity” of each member of the human family. Drawing upon contemporary theorizations of mythmaking and sacralization, this article will elucidate the manner in which inherent dignity (...) functions as the central item of sacredness within what we might call the “secular morality” of universal human rights. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers and social theorists have engaged in an extensive critique of the project of modernity during the past three decades. However, many feminists seem to assume that the critique of religion essential to this project remains valid. Radical criticism of religion in the European tradition presupposes a theory of religion that is highly ethnocentric, and Marx's theory of religion serves as a case in point.

Those of us who study the history and politics of the concept of religion and its related terms often find that our peers in adjacent disciplines or subdisciplines do not take into account our findings and continue to use the terms naively and unreflexively. Perhaps this is because they are unaware of the problematic norms knotted into the history of the concept or the contested political stakes involved in its use. Or, perhaps they are engaged in just the very sort (...) of politics our subdiscipline documents. When discussing this with one of the editors of CRR, he asked me to outline why those not engaged in the historicization of the concept of religion should take our work into account. How or why would a contemporary sociologist of religion benefit from reading, for example, a discourse analysis of Reformation-era theologico-political rhetoric? To that end, here I put forward the following theses on the critique of the concept of religion, making the case, as boldly and as succinctly as I can, why our work is relevant to all who write on “religion,” and provide references to the essential literature on the subject for those who wish to pursue further reading on the matter. (shrink)

There has been a longstanding interest in discovering or uncovering resemblances among what are ostensibly diverse religious schemas by employing a range of methodological approaches and tools. However, it is generally considered a problematic undertaking. Jonathan Z. Smith has produced a large body of work aimed at explicating this and has tacitly based his model of comparison on metaphor, which is traditionally understood to connote similarity between two or more things, as based on a linguistic or pragmatic assessment. However, another (...) possible approach is cognitive. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have championed the view of “conceptual metaphor,” which regards metaphor as being pervasive not only in language, but also in thought and action. Indeed, according to them, it basically structures our conceptual operations and hence views of the world through partially mapping knowledge across ontological domains, generally from the concrete to the abstract. I shall argue that a similar mechanism can fruitfully be applied to comparing religious schemas, as based on the postulated relationship between the domains of human and divine, physical and abstract, and as realized through expressions of journeying and reflection. (shrink)

This article argues for a rethinking of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of religion. Taking into consideration some of Habermas’s recent writings on the topic, it is argued that his conception of religion is untenable. Recent critical studies on the discourse of religion and its historical context have rendered the classic conception of religion suspect. Instead of describing a unique sphere of life, religion can and should be redescribed as something ordinary, embedded, and conceptually inseparable from a larger array of social imaginary (...) institutions and networks. (shrink)

A survey of developments over the last forty years suggests that little progress has been made in the development of comparative religious ethics as a discipline. While authors working in this field have produced a number of interesting works, the field lacks structure, including an agreement on the basic purpose, terms, and approaches by which contributions may be evaluated as better or worse. I provide an account of this history, suggesting that a way forward will involve marrying ethicists' interest in (...) arguments with close attention to the more and less formal structures by which groups of people organize the giving and taking of reasons. (shrink)

Drawing on resources from pragmatist thought allows religious ethicists to take account of the central role traditions play in the formation and development of moral concepts without thereby espousing moral relativism or becoming traditionalists. After giving an account of this understanding of the concept of tradition, I examine the ways in which understandings of tradition play out in two contemporary examples of tradition-based ethics: works in comparative ethics of war by James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay. I argue that a (...) pragmatist approach to tradition-based ethics allows for a nuanced and flexible understanding of moral traditions, and one that holds great promise for international consensus-building around shared ethical norms for the use of armed force. (shrink)

This comment provides a brief response to criticisms of Kelsay (2012) set forth in a recent essay by Elizabeth Bucar and Aaron Stalnaker.

What can the study of the comparative ethics tell us about the similarities and divergences between the just war and jihad traditions? How can the discipline help locate shared concerns, identify persistent differences, and reveal common narratives?

In the spirit of this group of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Religious Ethics, dealing with tradition-based reasoning, this article takes up a passage from Deuteronomy 20 that allows the “fearful and faint-hearted” person not to participate in battle, as well as the rabbinic and medieval appropriations of this passage in the Jewish tradition. It argues that this verse gives primacy to affect in a way that complicates standard interpretations of the Jewish tradition on just war (...) and allows us to see the pliability of tradition. Finally, the article argues that scholars assessing the justice of conflicts need to attend to the circulation of affects in a reasoning community, as is currently happening on scholarship on moral injury. (shrink)

Full-Blooded religion is not acceptable in mainstream bioethics. This article excavates the cultural history that led to the suppression of religion in bioethics. Bioethicists typically fall into one of the following camps. 1) The irreligious, who advocate for suppressing religion, as do Timothy F. Murphy, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. This irreligious camp assumes American Fundamentalist Protestantism is the real substance of all religions. 2) Religious bioethicists, who defend religion by emphasizing its functions and diminishing its metaphysical commitments. Religious defenders (...) empty religion of its theology to present its feel-good functions in a way that is acceptable to the irreligious. However, religion reduced to its functions dissolves into a counter-culture that may counteract materialism but lacks the power to motivate much more. This article criticizes both camps, as both presume Enlightenment myths and consequently neuter religion. Both irreligious and religious bioethicists commonly presume Enlightenment myths about secularity and religion. Secularity is presumed neutral and rational. Religion is presumed divisive and irrational. This myth provides built-in value-judgements; we have already judged secularity as good and religion as bad. Much of the debate over religion in bioethics is arguing over false stereotypes of religion. Consequently, mainstream bioethics neuters religion, while the irreligious are gifted political power to define the field. (shrink)

This is a response to Russell McCutcheon’s book chapter titled “On Concepts and Entities: Varieties of Critical Scholarship” in which he criticizes the value-driven approached advocated in previous editorials of Critical Research on Religion. This response points out that critical religion is also value-driven and not non-normative as he claims, but that this is what makes it critical.

Scholarship has grown increasingly nuanced in its grappling with the intersections of religion, science, and technology but requires a new paradigm. Contemporary approaches to specific technologies reveal a wide variety of perspectives but remain too often committed to typological classification. To be vigilant of our obligation to understand and reveal, scholars in the study of religion, science, and technology can adopt a hydra‐logical stance: we can recognize that there are cultural monsters possessing scientific, technological, and religious heads. These heads may (...) work with a common agenda or they might not. They might disagree, pulling their shared body back and forth in a public commotion that lays waste to their surroundings. They might see past one another or move in tandem—purposively or not. Evaluations of climate response and AI benefit from seeing how the various heads are inseparable: indeed, cutting one off simply promotes the growth of new heads. Methodological and analytical clarity, therefore, emerges in the transition from schemes of classification to the recognition of hydras. (shrink)

Will there be any joint future for science and Islam? Although such questions have recently received considerable attention, more basic questions are often ignored. This article aims at addressing some of those more basic questions through exploring the assumptions that underlie different possible understandings of the question about the future of Islam and science. By investigating the relation between conceptualizations of religion and the question about the future of Islam and science, it will be argued that different understandings of the (...) concept of religion (i.e., whether it denotes real objects, whether it is universal, and whether it is belief centered) lead to extremely different readings of the question. Besides, it will be argued that different answers to the question about the future of Islam and science can be understood in terms of the inference to best theological explanation; thus, the criteria that one assumes for the best theological explanation result in different criteria for evaluation of the answers. (shrink)

Addressing studies of the concepts of structure and agency, in 2008 sociologist François Dépelteau called for a ‘relational approach’ that compared the ‘trans-actions’ of actors, but notably left open the question of how such a study should be conducted. The present article attempts to operationalise Dépelteau’s call, albeit in a manner tailored specifically to meet the needs of researchers in the area of ‘lived ancient religion’. The study of ‘trans-action’ is operationalised here by employing key terms drawn from Staf Hellemans’s (...) ‘processing approach’ to the study of religion, in which agents ‘process’ their environments through selection, modification, assembly, performance, integration, and resonance. In the study of the religions of Mediterranean antiquity, questions of structure and agency can be addressed relationally by comparing the performances of specific actors, to the extent that such performances are accessible in the material evidence; for example, in the form of texts, statuary, art, and architecture. In an attempt to demonstrate the utility of this approach, a case study of the ritual of circumcision in ancient Judaism is offered. (shrink)

In recent decades, the concept of religion, and specifically its application to non-Western historic cultural formations has come unter critical scrutiny. This paper applies the analysis of semantic fields to three works by the medieval Japanese Buddhist monk Dōgen (1200–1253), who came to be revered as founder of the still extant Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism. By putting his notion of the ‘Buddha Way’ (butsudō) into strong relief, it provides a basis for comparison with modern concepts of religion. The conclusion (...) is that Dōgen’s ideas conform to a surprisingly large extent with modern ideas. This may be one reason for his popularity in modern times. But Dōgen should not be taken to represent the general world-view of medieval Japan. Further comparative analyses of other corpora remain necessary to gauge the applicability of‘religion’ as a category for the analysis of medieval Japanese culture. (shrink)