In the last two decades, cognitive and evolutionary approaches have appeared as new and invigorating attempts to explain what religion is: how religious phenomena emerged, why they persist, and why we find recurring patterns across cultural and historical borders. When addressing such question from perspectives informed by evolutionary biology and cognitive science, a pertinent question arises: How do we reconcile these new theories, and more experimentally inclined approaches, with a more traditional historical and/or sociological study of religion? What can cognitive and evolutionary approaches teach a general science of religion? In this paper I argue that historiography must indeed take theoretical and explanatory models arising from cognitive and evolutionary approaches seriously, but that we need to conceptualize not only the relation between distinct explanatory levels, but also the constraints imposed by the scope of particular scholarly endeavors.
The article attempts to evaluate the possible contribution of cognitive psychology to our understanding of Pythia's role in divinatory procedures taking place in the Delphic Oracle. In previous scholarship there was a deep-rooted tendency to search for a natural substance whose digestion should have caused changes in Pythia's mental state. These efforts have recently been revived in the form of a much advertised "Ethylene hypothesis", purportedly harmonizing information of ancient sources with scientific knowledge of modern geology. According to the author of this article, the actual merit of this hypothesis remains very problematic. In contrast, it is argued, based on the evaluation of ancient descriptions of Delphic divinatory consultations and research conducted in the field of cognitive psychology, that Pythia's mental state can be classified as an instance of Patterned Dissociative Identity, which is very often emicly understood as the possession of human mind by spiritual beings. This mental state was adopted by Pythiai routinely and was characterized by stable observable symptoms which warranted the authenticity of spoken oracles in the eyes of consultants and other participants.
The present contribution offers a recapitulation of the author's book entitled An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge (2019). The book is intended to offer a most comprehensive account of the History of Religions as an academic discipline, from its inception as a Victorian science of religion to the postmodern rejection of master narratives and from the birth of contemporary Religious Studies to the recent resurgence of cognitive and evolutionary approaches. One of the major themes to emerge from the historiographical analysis is the constant disciplinary temptation to move aside scientific explanations in favour of fideistic redescriptions. Ever struggling to come to terms with science, the historical study of religions in all the major national schools of the past considered here has reaffirmed time and again the absolute value of religion as epistemic truth, delegitimizing, depreciating, and discarding scientific and rational tools as useless for grasping the inner core of human consciousness.
Můžeme získat skrze literární dílo nějaké poznání? Tuto otázku prověřuje epistemologie literatury, která analyzuje možnosti a způsoby poznání prostřednictvím literárního díla. Jeden ze současných badatelů, Michel Pierssens, vypracoval tři možnosti poznání moderní fikce. and Can we obtain any cognition from work of literature? Epistemology of literature understanded as the analysis of possibilities and ways of cognition through work of literature examines this question. One of modern reseachers, Michel Pierssens, elaborated three possibilities of cognition from modern fiction.