Pascal Boyer
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"People have stories about vanishing islands and talking cats, but they usually do not insert them in their religious beliefs. In contrast, people produce concepts of ghosts and person-like gods and make use of these concepts when they think about a whole variety of social questions (what is moral behavior, what to do with dead people, how misfortune occurs, why perform rituals, etc.). This is much more precise than just relaxing the usual principles of sound reasoning." --Religion Explained (2001) by Pascal Boyer |
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Pascal Robert Boyer is a French and American anthropologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on psychology and anthropology.
See also
- Evolutionary origin of religions
- Evolutionary epistemology
- Evolutionary psychology
- Faith and rationality
- Relationship between religion and science
- Cognitive science of religion
- Evolutionary psychology of religion
- Cognitive anthropology
