What is (a) Religion

Catalog description

Our aim in this course is to explore one of the many strands of thinking about religion in North Atlantic intellectual life since the late nineteenth century. We’ll begin with Edward Tylor, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Tylor was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in England and a dominant figure in shaping academic thinking about religion and culture in the English-speaking world in the late nineteenth-century and into the twentieth. Weber and Durkheim are towering figures in the creation of the field of sociology, and questions about religion were central to the work of them both. Then we’ll look at some more recent anthropology and evolutionary psychology of religion. Finally, we’ll consider briefly how some aspects of the cultural backgrounds of these theorists played a role in shaping the theories they proposed. This course is part of the NYU Big Ideas series and will be offered in Fall 2020 only.