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.