Author: Bronislaw Malinowski
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473393124
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
This book contains three prolific essays by the world renown polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. First published in 1926, Magic, Science and Religion provides its readers with a seminal collection of texts exploring the concepts of magic, religion, science, rite and myth, detailing how they interlink to offer exciting and informative insights into the Trobrianders of New Guinea. A must-have for any students of anthropology and collectors of Malinowski’s work, we are republishing this classic work with a new introductory biography of the author.
Author: Stanley J. Tambiah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521376310
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This accessible and illuminating book explores the classical opposition between magic, science and religion.
Author: Mark A. Waddell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108425283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
An accessible new exploration of the vibrant world of early modern Europe through a focus on magic, science, and religion.
Author: Randall Styers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190287926
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.
Author: Allison P. Coudert
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
This fascinating study looks at how the seemingly incompatible forces of science, magic, and religion came together in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries to form the foundations of modern culture. As Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America makes clear, the early modern period was one of stark contrasts: witch burnings and the brilliant mathematical physics of Isaac Newton; John Locke's plea for tolerance and the palpable lack of it; the richness of intellectual and artistic life, and the poverty of material existence for all but a tiny percentage of the population. Yet, for all the poverty, insecurity, and superstition, the period produced a stunning galaxy of writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists. This book looks at the conditions that fomented the emergence of such outstanding talent, innovation, and invention in the period 1450 to 1800. It examines the interaction between religion, magic, and science during that time, the impossibility of clearly differentiating between the three, and the impact of these forces on the geniuses who laid the foundation for modern science and culture.
Author: Arthur James Balfour
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Religion and science
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
Author: Ira Livingston
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004358072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
Magic Science Religion explores surprising intersections among the three meaning-making and world-making practices named in the title. Through colorful examples, the book reveals circuitous ways that social, cultural and natural systems connect, enabling real kinds of magic to operate.
Author: Dan Burton
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253216564
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 414
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Book Description
"[P.D. Ouspensky's] yearning for a transcendent, timeless reality—one that cancels out physical disintegration and death—figures into science at some fundamental level. Einstein found solace in his theory of relativity, which suggested to him that events are ever-present in the space-time continuum. When his friend Michele Besso passed on shortly before his own death, he wrote: 'For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'" —from Magic, Mystery, and Science The triumph of science would appear to have routed all other explanations of reality. No longer does astrology or alchemy or magic have the power to explain the world to us. Yet at one time each of these systems of belief, like religion, helped shed light on what was dark to our understanding. Nor have the occult arts disappeared. We humans have a need for mystery and a sense of the infinite. Magic, Mystery, and Science presents the occult as a "third stream" of belief, as important to the shaping of Western civilization as Greek rationalism or Judeo-Christianity. The occult seeks explanations in a world that is living and intelligent—quite unlike the one supposed by science. By taking these beliefs seriously, while keeping an eye on science, this book aims to capture some of the power of the occult. Readers will discover that the occult has a long history that reaches back to Babylonia and ancient Egypt. It proceeds alongside, and frequently mingles with, religion and science. From the Egyptian Book of the Dead to New Age beliefs, from Plato to Adolf Hitler, occult ways of knowing have been used—and hideously abused—to explain a world that still tempts us with the knowledge of its dark secrets.
Author: Randall Styers
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195169417
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Randall Styers seeks to account for the vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that it can best be explained in light of the European and Euro-American drive to establish and secure their own identity as normative.
Author: Jacob Neusner Professor of Religion University of South Florida
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199729336
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Every culture makes the distinction between "true religion" and magic, regarding one action and its result as "miraculous," while rejecting another as the work of the devil. Surveying such topics as Babylonian witchcraft, Jesus the magician, magic in Hasidism and Kabbalah, and magic in Anglo-Saxon England, these ten essays provide a rigrous examination of the history of this distinction in Christianity and Judaism. Written by such distinguished scholars as Jacob Neusner, Hans Penner, Howard Kee, Tzvi Abusch, Susan R. Garrett, and Moshe Idel, the essays explore a broad range of topics, including how certain social groups sort out approved practices and beliefs from those that are disapproved--providing fresh insight into how groups define themselves; "magic" as an insider's term for the outsider's religion; and the tendency of religious traditions to exclude the magical. In addition the collection provides illuminating social, cultural, and anthropological explanations for the prominence of the magical in certain periods and literature.
