Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis - Festschrift in Honour of Armin W. Geertz
Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis - Festschrift in Honour of Armin W. Geertz
复制标题
进化、认知和宗教史：新的综合 - 纪念阿明·W·格尔茨的纪念文集
DOI：
10.1163/9789004385375_031
复制
发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Eidinow E
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Eidinow E
This chapter was developed during the course of three workshops on the theme of cognitive approaches to ancient religious experience (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC] research-networking scheme), which I ran with Armin during 2015–17. 1 The workshops brought together scholars of, on the one hand, ancient religion, and, on the other, the cognitive science of religion, with the intention of developing a new agenda for interdisciplinary research: Could cognitive approaches to religious study be tested with evidence from the ancient world? Could scholars of ancient religions use cognitive theories to develop insights into evidence for ancient religious phenomena? As a way of pursuing the Humanities, this “cognitive turn” is perhaps not so startling (see for example the burgeoning field of cognitive literary studies), but it offers a novel direction for conducting research into ancient cultures, and, as Armin has observed (2004, 355), it may be of particular use for exploration of the “academic construction called ‘religion’,” and the associated “ideas and assumptions [which] often turn on the nature of human beings, their origins, cognition and psychology, their cultural and social needs, and so on.” In this chapter, I have attempted to bring to bear research in the field of embodied cognition, specifically theories of embodied simulation, on the evidence and assumptions about ancient Greek divination, specifically the consultation of oracles. In particular, this essay is concerned with the questions of how and why divination may have seemed useful, even powerful, to ancient
