Critical Episodes in the Emergence and Development of the Scientific Study of Religion



Lecture #1

The Pre-Socratic Revolution in Thought Makes the Scientific Study of Religious Thought and
Behaviour Possible


F. M. Cornford: Before and After Socrates (1932)

Benjamin Farrington: Greek Science and Its Meaning for Us (1949)

Karl Popper: “Back to the Pre-Socratics,” in his Conjectures and Refutations (1962)



Lecture #2

Aristotle’s Belated Contribution to the Scientific Study of Religious Thought and Behaviour


Edward Grant: The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious Institutional,
and Intellectual Contexts (1996)

Edward Grant: Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (2006)

Edward Grant: A History of Natural Philosophy from the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century
(2007)

John Herman Randall Jr.: Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis
(1970)

Gillian Evans: Old Arts, New Theology: The Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (xxxx)

Toby Huff: The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (1993)

Donald Wiebe: The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (1991)



Lecture #3

The Age of Discovery and Its Import for the Comparative Study of Religions


Samuel Preus: Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (1987).

Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, Wijnand Mijnhardt (eds): The Book that Changed Europe: Picart’s and
Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (2010)

James Turner: Religion Enters the Academy: The Origin of the Scholarly Study of Religion (2011)



Lecture #4

The Age of Reason and the Ascendancy of Scientific Philology


Guy Stroumsa: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (2010)

Richard Foster Jones: Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in
Seventeenth-Century England (1936/1982)

Steven Toulmin: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990)

Peter Gay: The Enlightenment, and Interpretation: Vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966); Vol.
2, The Science of Freedom (1969)

[Carl Becker: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophes (xxxx)]

Hans Blumenberg: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1988)

Steven Shapin: The Scientific Revolution (1996)

P. Bowler, I. Morus: Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey (2005)

Brian Easlea: Witch-Hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the
Scientific Revolution 1450-1750 (xxxx)

H. Floris Cohen: The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (xxxx)

Arun Bala: The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (2008)


Lecture #5

From Romanticism to Postmodernism: The Triumph of the Failure of Nerve


Steven Shapin: The Scientific Revolution (1996)

Ernest Gellner: Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion (1992)

Tim Blanning: The Romantic Revolution (2010)

Bruno Latour: We Have Never Been Modern (1993)

John H. Zamitto: A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from
Quine to Latour (2009)



Lecture #6

New Expectations for the Study of Religion in the Modern Research University?


Paul J. Griffiths: Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (1999)

Koku von Stuckrad: The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change,
1800-2000. (2014)

Kevin Schilbrack: Philosophy and the Study of Religion: A Manifesto (2014)

Brad S. Gregory: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (2012)


Arthur Herman: The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of
Western Civilization (2013)

Julie Reuben: The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the
Marginalization of Morality (19996)

Donald Wiebe: The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the
Academy (1999)