General Abstract:
One source of our ideas about religion is the anthropology
and sociology of religions, which took their first steps as modern disciplines
in the decades leading up to the First World War. In these lectures, I'll
explore some of the central ideas of the field in the work of some central
figures—Edward Tylor, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim—and go on to argue that
their ways of framing religions show up in more recent Darwinian work on the
evolution of religion. I'll end by discussing whether the study of what we now
call "religions" is helped or hindered by the conception of religion
the founding fathers invented. Along the way we'll consider the great diversity
of the people, practices, ideas, institutions, and identities, we call
"religious." The project is one on social ontology—trying to
characterize a kind of socially-produced object—and in the philosophy of the
social sciences that aim to explore that object.
"Identities Evolving"
Abstract: In the final lecture, we'll look at two kinds of
explanation of features of religious life in the work of contemporary
evolutionary theorists, which pay attention to some of the features of
religions noticed by these founding fathers of the modern social sciences of
religion. We'll consider whether a concept of religion is needed in these
explanations, and also turn, at the end, to the question whether religions have
anything essential in common.