Between Magic And Rationality

Author : Vibeke Steffen
Publisher : Museum Tusculanum Press
ISBN 13 : 8763542137
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Between Magic and Rationality written by Vibeke Steffen and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Between Magic and Reality, Vibeke Steffen, Steffen Jöhncke, and Kirsten Marie Raahauge bring together a diverse range of ethnographies that examine and explore the forms of reflection, action, and interaction that govern the ways different contemporary societies create and challenge the limits of reason. The essays here visit an impressive array of settings, including international scientific laboratories, British spiritualist meetings, Chinese villages, Danish rehabilitation centers, and Uzbeki homes, where they encounter a diverse assortment of people whose beliefs and concerns exhibit an unusual but central contemporary dichotomy: scientific reason versus spiritual/paranormal belief. Exploring the paradoxical way these modes of thought push against reason's boundaries, they offer a deep look at the complex ways they coexist, contest one another, and are ultimately intertwined. Vibeke Steffen is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, where Steffen Jöncke is senior advisor. Kirsten Marie Raahauge is associate professor in the School of Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Author : Stanley J. Tambiah
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521376310
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality written by Stanley J. Tambiah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-03-22 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible and illuminating book explores the classical opposition between magic, science and religion.

Author : Graham M. Jones
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022651871X
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Magic's Reason written by Graham M. Jones and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Magic’s Reason, Graham M. Jones tells the entwined stories of anthropology and entertainment magic. The two pursuits are not as separate as they may seem at first. As Jones shows, they not only matured around the same time, but they also shared mutually reinforcing stances toward modernity and rationality. It is no historical accident, for example, that colonial ethnographers drew analogies between Western magicians and native ritual performers, who, in their view, hoodwinked gullible people into believing their sleight of hand was divine. Using French magicians’ engagements with North African ritual performers as a case study, Jones shows how magic became enshrined in anthropological reasoning. Acknowledging the residue of magic’s colonial origins doesn’t require us to dispense with it. Rather, through this radical reassessment of classic anthropological ideas, Magic’s Reason develops a new perspective on the promise and peril of cross-cultural comparison.

Author : Manfred Horstmanshoff
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9047414314
Total Pages : 423 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine written by Manfred Horstmanshoff and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of methods in Ancient Near Eastern and Greek and Roman medicine, based on representative text corpora. Central is the question of what is "rational", or not, in the various systems.

Author : Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317544730
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Religion as Magical Ideology written by Konrad Talmont-Kaminski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Religion as Magical Ideology' examines the relationship between rationality and supernatural beliefs arguing that such beliefs are products of evolution, cognition and culture. The book does not offer a false rapprochement between reason and religion; instead, it explores their interrelationship as a series of complex adaptations between cognitive and cultural processes. Exploring the nature of the tension between religious traditions and reason, 'Religion as Magical Ideology' develops a dual inheritance theory of religion - which combines the cognitive byproduct and prosocial adaptation accounts - and analyses the connection between the function of a belief and the degree of protection it gets from potential counter-evidence. With discussion ranging from individual cognitive mechanisms, general functional considerations, to the limits of evolutionary and cognitive processes, the book offers readers a systematic account of how cognition shapes religious beliefs and practices.

Author : Ernesto De Martino
Publisher : Hau
ISBN 13 : 9780990505099
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Magic written by Ernesto De Martino and published by Hau. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is testament to de Martino's innovation and engagement with Hegelian historicism and phenomenology--a work of ethnographic theory way ahead of its time. This new translation of Sud e Magia, his 1959 study of ceremonial magic and witchcraft in southern Italy, shows how De Martino is not interested in the question of whether magic is rational or irrational but rather in why it came to be perceived as a problem of knowledge in the first place. Setting his exploration within his wider, pathbreaking theorization of ritual, as well as in the context of his politically sensitive analysis of the global south's historical encounters with Western science, he presents the development of magic and ritual in Enlightenment Naples as a paradigmatic example of the complex dynamics between dominant and subaltern cultures. Far ahead of its time, Magic is still relevant as anthropologists continue to wrestle with modernity's relationship with magical thinking.

Author : J. Agassi
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9400934912
Total Pages : 469 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rationality: The Critical View written by J. Agassi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our papers on the rationality of magic, we distinghuished, for purposes of analysis, three levels of rationality. First and lowest (rationalitYl) the goal directed action of an agent with given aims and circumstances, where among his circumstances we included his knowledge and opinions. On this level the magician's treatment of illness by incantation is as rational as any traditional doctor's blood-letting or any modern one's use of anti-biotics. At the second level (rationalitY2) we add the element of rational thinking or thinking which obeys some set of explicit rules, a level which is not found in magic in general, though it is sometimes given to specific details of magical thinking within the magical thought-system. It was the late Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard who observed that when considering magic in detail the magician may be as consistent or critical as anyone else; but when considering magic in general, or any system of thought in general, the magician could not be critical or even comprehend the criticism. Evans-Pritchard went even further: he was sceptical as to whether it could be done in a truly consistent manner: one cannot be critical of one's own system, he thought. On this level (rationalitY2) of discussion we have explained (earlier) why we prefer to wed Evans Pritchard's view of the magician's capacity for piece-meal rationality to Sir James Frazer's view that magic in general is pseudo-rational because it lacks standards of rational thinking.

Author : Berel Dov Lerner
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136404929
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rules, Magic and Instrumental Reason written by Berel Dov Lerner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a systematic and critical discussion of Peter Winch's writings on the philosophy of the social sciences. The author points to Winch's tendency to over-emphasize the importance of language and communication, and his insufficient attention to the role of practical, technological activites in human life and society. It also offers an appendix devoted to the controversy between the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere regarding Captain James Cook's Hawaiian adventures. Essential reading for those studying the development of philosophy in the twentieth century, this book will also be of great interest to anthropologists, sociologists, scholars of religion, and all those with an interest in the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences.

Author : Kei Yoshida
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739174002
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rationality and Cultural Interpretivism written by Kei Yoshida and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-08-06 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rationality and Cultural Interpretivism: A Critical Assessment of Failed Solutions critically assesses cultural interpretivism by scrutinizing five different proponents of it and their solutions to the problem of rationality. The book examines the works of Peter Winch, Charles Taylor, Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, and Gananath Obeyesekere and their contributions to the so-called rationality debate in the philosophy of the social sciences. This debate began with Winch’s criticism of Edward Evans-Pritchard and has become one of the central debates in the field since 1960s, continuing as a controversy between Sahlins and Obeyesekere. Kei Yoshida reveals the need for a cogent solution to the problem of rationality. He identifies two main problems with previous theories: first, that they exaggerate the differences between the natural and the social/cultural, and hence they also exaggerate the differences between the natural and the social sciences; and second, that they ignore important social science problems, particularly outcomes from the unintended consequences of human actions. Yoshida urges social scientists not simply to interpret agents’ intentions or symbolic systems, but also to explain the unintended consequences of human actions. Still entangled in positivism, cultural interpretivists claim that the social sciences differ from the natural sciences and thus reject any unity of method. Yoshida argues that we need to overcome the mistaken positivist image of science in order to develop a more fruitful philosophy of the social sciences. The analysis presented in this book will be of value to students and scholars of social epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of the social sciences, and the social sciences themselves, as well as anyone interested in the philosophical problem of rationality and relativism.

Author : I.C. Jarvie
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317401174
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rationality and Relativism written by I.C. Jarvie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-03 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology revolves round answers to problems about the nature, development and unity of mankind; problems that are both philosophical and scientific. In this book, first published in 1984, Professor Jarvie applies Popper’s philosophy of science to understanding the history and theory of anthropology. Jarvie describes how the ancient view that the aim of science and philosophy was to get at the truth is challenged in anthropology by the doctrine of cultural relativism; that is, that truth varies with the cultural framework. He shows how philosophers as various as Peter Winch, W.V.O. Quine, W.T. Jones, Nelson Goodman and Richard Rorty were influenced by this doctrine. Yet these philosophers also accept the value of rational argument. Jarvie believes that there is a contradiction between relativism and any notion of human rationality that centres around argument. Forced by the contradiction to choose between rationality and relativism, he argues strongly that logical, scientific and moral considerations favour rationality and urge repudiation of relativism. The central argument of the book is that relativism is intellectually disastrous and has fostered intellectual attitudes from which anthropology still suffers.