The Western Epistemic Tradition and the Scientific Study of Religion - Donald Wiebe
The Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment
The Western Epistemic Tradition and the Scientific Study of Religion - Donald Wiebe
Donald Wiebe [+]
University of Toronto
Donald Wiebe is Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Trinity College at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Religion and Truth: Towards and Alternative Paradigm for the Study of Religion (De Gruyter, 1981), The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), Beyond Legitimation: Essays on the Problem of Religious Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) and The Learned Practice of Religion in the Modern University (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Description
The intellectual developments in Europe in the period between the Renaissance and Romanticism, including ‘the age of discovery’ of the world beyond Europe, are essential for understanding the ultimate emergence of a scientific study of religion. The Scientific Revolution and the search for explanations of natural phenomena based simply upon human reason provided a framework for the scientific explanation of social and cultural phenomena.