Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science

by Robin Horton

Overview

The anthropologist Robin Horton is widely regarded as one of the most creative and critical thinkers of his generation. This collection of some of his classic papers on African religion, written between l960 and l990 is also a wide-ranging inquiry into religious thought, particularly its relationship to aesthetic and scientific thought. Horton criticizes recent orthodoxies in this area, and instead proposes an "Intellectualist" alternative that stresses similarities between the religious and the scientific.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521369268
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/13/1997
Series:	Essays on Magic, Religion and Science
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	484
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.06(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Beginnings: l. A definition of religion, and its uses; Part II. Mainly Critical: 2. Neo-Tylorianism: sound sense or sinister prejudice?; 3. Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim and the scientific revolution; 4. Back to Frazer?; 5. Professor Winch on safari; 6. Judaeo-Christian spectacles: boon or bane to the study of African religions?; Part III. Mainly Constructive: 7. African traditional thought and Western science; 8. Paradox and explanation: a reply to Mr Skorupski; 9. Tradition and modernity revisited; Postscript.

Editorial Reviews

"The reader is quickly drawn into Horton's world of intellectual debates on African belief, ritual and cosmology in the context of closed and open systems. The result is an intellectual feast which weaves human nature, idea, belief and action through classical, modern and postmodern theory." African Studies Review

"This is a profound, provocative, detailed and absorbing book, which deserves a wide readership." Expository Times

"The reader is quickly drawn into Horton's world of intellectual debates on African belief, ritual and cosmology in the context of closed and open systems. The result is an intellectual feast which weaves human nature, idea, belief and action through classical, modern and postmodern theory." African Studies Review

"The 1993 publication of Robin Horton's Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West, which collects some of his most important essays on African religion and modern science, offers an occasion to review the lifelong effort of this distinguished anthropologist and philosopher to demonstrate the kinship between primitive and modern thought and, more generally, between religion and science. Horton, who is English, has lived and taught for many years in Nigeria and is an expert on the Kalabari people, from whom he draws many of his examples of religious thinking." Robert S. Segal, Annals of Scholarship

From the Publisher