[PDF] Between Magic And Rationality eBook

Author : Vibeke Steffen
Publisher : Museum Tusculanum Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 37,62 MB
Release : 2015-04-21
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 8763542137

GET BOOK

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
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 40,10 MB
Release : 1990-03-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780521376310

GET BOOK

This accessible and illuminating book explores the classical opposition between magic, science and religion.

Author : Graham M. Jones
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 37,62 MB
Release : 2017-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 022651871X

GET BOOK

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
Page : 423 pages
File Size : 39,65 MB
Release : 2018-07-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9047414314

GET BOOK

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 : Ernesto De Martino
Publisher : Hau
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 47,60 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Basilicata (Italy)
ISBN : 9780990505099

GET BOOK

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 : Stanley J. Tambiah
Publisher :
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 23,42 MB
Release : 1990-03-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780521374866

GET BOOK

This accessible and illuminating book explores the classical opposition between magic, science and religion.

Author : J. Agassi
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 469 pages
File Size : 11,58 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Science
ISBN : 9400934912

GET BOOK

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 : Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 38,55 MB
Release : 2014-10-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1317544730

GET BOOK

'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 : Berel Dov Lerner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 18,68 MB
Release : 2013-12-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1136404929

GET BOOK

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.