The Western Epistemic Tradition and the Scientific Study of Religion - Donald Wiebe
Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Study of Religion
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 fourteenth-century Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the discovery of a new epistemic tradition in European thought, and the formation of the secular state made the development of science, and its application to the study of human culture including religion, possible. The idea of a scientific study of religion emerged in the nineteenth century and was brought to fruition in the twentieth. It has not yet, however, been firmly established in modern research universities in Europe, Britain, America, or elsewhere; he idea is still very much a matter of scholarly debate.