The traditions and institutions that we call religions abound with references to the supernatural: ancestral spirits, karma, the afterlife, miracles, revelation, deities, etc. How are students of religion to approach the behaviors, doctrines, and beliefs that refer to such phenomena, which by their very nature are supposed to defy the methods of empirical research and the theories of historical scholarship? That is the question of methodological naturalism.
The Question of Methodological Naturalism offers ten thoughtful engagements with that perennial question for the academic study of religion. Contributors include established senior scholars and newer voices propounding a range of perspectives, resulting in both surprising points of convergence and irreconcilable differences in how our shared discipline should be conceptualized and practiced.
Jason N. Blum, Ph.D. (2009), University of Pennsylvania, is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Davidson College. He is the author of
Zen and the Unspeakable God (Penn State Press, 2015), and various articles concerning methodology in religious studies and topics at the intersection of philosophy and religion.
"This volume,
The Question of Methodological Naturalism, represents a wide range of approaches to methodological naturalism in the study of religion. (...) One of the major advantages of the book is its open and clear-cut polemical thrust: as the editor Jason Blum notes, there simply is no solution to the problem of naturalism on which scholars generally agree." - Aleksei Rakhmanin,
University of Helsinki, in:
Reading Religion, 26 July 2021
Contents Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
The Question of Methodological Naturalism
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Jason N. Blum Naturalism as Method and Metaphysic: A Comparative Historical Taxonomy
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Daniel L. Pals Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism Is Impossible
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Craig Martin Orthodoxy Is Not Scientific: a Phenomenological Critique of Naturalism
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Jonathan Tuckett Naturalisms, Ineffability Claims, and Symbolic Meanings
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Nancy Frankenberry Natural Ineffability and the Scandal of Language
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Jason N. Blum In Defense of a Naturalistic Approach to Religion
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Robert A. Segal Who's Afraid of Reductionism? Methodological Naturalism and the Academic Study of Religion
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Edward Slingerland What Can the Failure of Cog-Sci of Religion Teach Us about the Future of Religious Studies?
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Ivan Strenski Must a Scholar of Religion Be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic?
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Michael A. Cantrell A Better Methodological Naturalism
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Kevin Schilbrack Index
Anyone interested in religion and the study of it, and particularly those with an interest in philosophical or methodological issues associated with the investigation of religion.