Pascal Boyer

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Pascal Boyer (born before 1988) is a French- American psychologist , anthropologist and religious philosopher .

Life

Boyer has taught in the United Kingdom , the United States, and France. He is endowed professor for Individual and Collective Memory of the Henry Luce Foundation at Washington University in St. Louis .

Boyer focuses on the tension between religion and culture, the naturalness of religion, and individual and collective memory . In the book And Man Made God , Boyer sets out his view that belief in gods gives man meaning to what is actually meaningless. He reinterprets religion by looking for its origin in neurology and psychology . To a certain extent, man has a tendency towards spirituality and invents his own God. For this he is predetermined by evolution , since this behavior is useful to him.

Works (selection)

author
  • Barricades mystérieuses & pièges à pensées. Introduction to the analysis of the épogées catch. Société d'Ethnologie, Paris 1988, ISBN 2-901161-31-6 .
  • Tradition as Truth and Communication. A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. 1st edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, ISBN 0-521-37417-0 .
  • The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. A Cognitive Theory of Religion. University of California Press, Berkeley 1994, ISBN 0-520-07559-5 .
  • And man created God . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-608-94032-4 (translation of the American edition: Religion Explained. The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books, New York 2001, ISBN 0-465-00695-7 ).
  • Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create . Yale University Press 2018. ISBN 0300223455 .
editor
  • Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism. 1st edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 0-521-43288-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pascal Boyer: What is man? The brain, your god . In: Die Zeit , No. 1/2009 of December 23, 2008. See reviews at Perlentaucher.de.
personal data
SURNAME Boyer, Pascal
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French-American psychologist, anthropologist and religious philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH before 1988