Note on Text
All the translations in this book are my own, except where otherwise noted.
All the figures and tables are my original works, except the artwork listed below:
Figure 1 The disciplinary landscape: major issues in the history of religions
visualized as a geological map © Davide Bonadonna, 2018.
Reproduced with permission.Figure 6 ‘What Evolution Looks Like' © Mike Keesey, 2018. Silhouettes from PhyloPic open database (Phylopic.org). CC licence BY 4.0. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 7 Silhouette credits, from left to right: Proconsul (by Mateus Zica, modified by T. Michael Keesey); Dryopithecus, Australopithecus, Homo neanderthalensis (by T. Michael Keesey; silhouettes from PhyloPic open database, Phylopic.org; CC BY-SA 3.0); Neolithic farmer adapted from Zden ek Burians painting Clovek v mladst dobe kanmenne, printed by Statni pedagogicke nakladatelstvi, Prague, 1951; Robert Liston. Printed silhouette. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0; warrior from J. Shooter (1854). Th e Kafirs of Natal and the Zulu Country. London: 1857, 201. Not to scale. Please note that the first three taxa were not known in Victorian times, as their presence is reported here for the sake of simplicity.
Figure 13 Silhouette credits, from left to right: businessman with briefcase, own work; Augustus as augur with lituus from Wikipedia, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Augur,_Nordisk_familjebok.png; Bronze figure of Kashmiri in Meditation by Malvina Hoffman. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0; shaman from Wikipedia, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Shamanism_in_Russia#/media/ File:Shaman_Buryatia.jpg, public domain; San Giuseppe da Copertino in estasi di Felice Boscaratti ( ca. 1762), chiesa di San Lorenzo, Vicenza (Italy). By Didier Descouens, from Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chiesa_di_San_Lorenzo_a_ Vicenza_-_Interno_-_San_Giuseppe_da_Copertino_in_estasi_di_ Felice_Boscaratti.jpg Didier Descouens CC BY-SA 4.0.
Figure 15 Silhouette credit: NASA, public domain, from Phylopic.org.
Epigraphs are reprinted by kind permission of the respective copyright holders (with the exception of the epigraphs for Chapters 2 and 5, for which my efforts to contact the publishers remain unanswered), and excerpted from the following sources:
Chapter 1 Martin, L. H. and D. Wiebe (eds) (2016). Conversations and Controversies in the Scientific Study of Religion: Collaborative and Co-authored Essays by Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 224.
Chapter 2 Popper, K. (1994). The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality. Edited by M. Notturno. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 95.
Chapter 3 Darwin, C. R. (1838). Notebook M [Metaphysics on morals and speculations on expression]. CUL-DAR125. Transcribed by K. Rookmaaker, edited by P. Barrett, corrected by J. van Wyhe. RN 3. Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/.
Chapter 4 Gould, S. J. (1986). ‘Evolution and the Triumph of Homology, or Why History Matters’. American Scientist 74(1): 63.
Chapter 5 E. Ionesco to T. Vianu, 20 February 1943, translated from Vianu, M. A. and V. Alexandrescu (eds) (1994). Scrisori catre Tudor Vianu II (19361949). Bucharest: Minerva, 233.
Chapter 6 Dennett, D. C. (2013). Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Th inking. London: Penguin, 45.
Chapter 7 Darwin, C. R. (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray. Volume 2. 1st edition, 385. Scanned by J. van Wyhe 1.2006; transcribed (double key) by AEL Data 9. 2006, corrections by van Wyhe. RN3. Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/.
Epilogue Momigliano, A. (1979). ‘A Hundred Years after Ranke’. In Primo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, 373. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.
Finally, I would like to thank Brill for their permission to reprint, update and revise a significant part of the following works for this book:
‘Mind the (Unbridgeable) Gaps: A Cautionary Tale about Pseudoscientific Distortions and Scientific Misconceptions in the Study of Religion’. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 28(2): 141-225.
‘ Politics of Nostalgia, Logical Fallacies, and Cognitive Biases: the Importance of Epistemology in the Age of Cognitive Historiography’ in A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, L. H. Martin, J. S. Jensen and J. Sorensen (eds), Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis. Festschrift in Honour of Armin W Geertz, 280-96. Leiden and Boston: Brill.