intellectica 2008/3, n° 50

Religion and Cognition

Lucien SCUBLA

The Birth of Divinity and of Insanity

Abstract: Twenty years after the criticism the author had already addressed to the research program of cognitivism applied to the study of religion, the article revisits this program, which was motivated by the limits of the structuralist theories of semiosis. In particular, the theory of learning which would allow an author like D. Sperber to limit the study of anthropology to cognitive psychology has nothing say about the universality of symbolic forms, which depends not only on the features of the human mind but also on features that only a philosophy of nature is able to reveal.

Keywords: criticism of cognitive anthropology; criticism of cultural relativity ; criticism of cognitive psychology; theory of ritual sacrifice  symbolic and rational processing.

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