Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives

ISBN-13: 9780415290586 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 288 str.

Kevin Schilbrack

Opis

Many philosophical approaches today seek to overcome the division between mind and body. If such projects succeed, then thinking is not restricted to the disembodied mind, but is in some sense done through the body. From a post-Cartesian perspective, then, ritual activities that discipline the body are not just thoughtless motions, but crucial parts of the way people think.
Thinking Through Rituals explores religious ritual acts and their connection to meaning and truth, belief, memory, inquiry, worldview and ethics. Drawing on philosophers such as Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, and sources from cognitive science, pragmatism and feminist theory, it provides philosophical resources for understanding religious ritual practices like the Christian Eucharistic ceremony, Hatha Yoga, sacred meditation or liturgical speech.
Its essays consider a wide variety of rituals in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism - including political protest rituals and gay commitment ceremonies, traditional Vedic and Yogic rites, Christian and Buddhist meditation and the Jewish Shabbat. They challenge the traditional disjunction between thought and action, showing how philosophy can help to illuminate the relationship between doing and meaning which ritual practices imply.

Spis treści

Notes on Contributors  Acknowledgements  Introduction: On the Use of Philosophy in the Study of Rituals  1. Ritual, Body Technique, and (inter)Subjectivity  2. Practce, Belief, and Feminist Philosophy of Religion  3. Rites of Passing: Foucault, Power, and Same-Sex Commitement Ceremonies  4. Scapegoat Rituals in Wittgensteinian Perspective  5. Ritual Inquiry: The Pragmatic Logic of Religious Practice  6. Ritual Metaphysics  7. Philosophical Naturalism and the Cognitive Approach to Ritual  8. Theories and Facts on Ritual Simultaneities  9. Moral Cultivation Through Ritual Participation: Xunzi's Philosophy of Ritual  10. The Ritual Roots of Moral Reason: Lessons from Mimamsa  11. Ritual Gives Rise to Thought: Liturgical Reasoning in Modern Jewish Philosophy  12. Ritual and Christian Philosophy  13. Religious Rituals, Spiritually Disciplined Practices, and Health  Index

O autorze

Kevin Schilbrack is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Wesleyan College, Georgia. A graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School, he is the editor of Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2002).