Supernatural Agents is popular PDF and ePub book, written by Iikka Pyysiainen in 2009-04-27, it is a fantastic choice for those who relish reading online the Religion genre. Let's immerse ourselves in this engaging Religion book by exploring the summary and details provided below. Remember, Supernatural Agents can be Read Online from any device for your convenience.
Supernatural Agents Book PDF Summary
The cognitive science of religion is a rapidly growing field whose practitioners apply insights from advances in cognitive science in order to provide a better understanding of religious impulses, beliefs, and behaviors. In this book Ilkka Pyysi?inen shows how this methodology can profitably be used in the comparative study of beliefs about superhuman agents. He begins by developing a theoretical outline of the basic, modular architecture of the human mind and especially the human capacity to understand agency. He then goes on to discuss examples of supernatural agency in detail, arguing that the human ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others forms the basis of conceptions of supernatural agents and of such social cognition in which supernatural agents are postulated as interested parties in social life. Beliefs about supernatural agency are natural, says Pyysi?inen, in the sense that such concepts are used in an intuitive and automatic fashion. Two dots and a straight line below them automatically trigger the idea of a face, for example. Given that the mind consists of a host of such modular mechanisms, certain kinds of beliefs will always have a selective advantage over others. Abstract theological concepts are usually elaborate versions of such simpler and more contagious folk conceptions. Pyysi?inen uses ethnographical and survey materials as well as doctrinal treatises to show that there are certain recurrent patterns in beliefs about supernatural agents both at the level of folk-religion and of formal theology.
Detail Book of Supernatural Agents PDF
- Author : Iikka Pyysiainen
- Release : 27 April 2009
- Publisher : Oxford University Press
- ISBN : 019970175X
- Genre : Religion
- Total Page : 304 pages
- Language : English
- PDF File Size : 16,6 Mb
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