A new article has been published in the Diccionario Interdisciplinar Austral. It is an article by Nathaniel Barrett, from Universidad de Navarra.
Cognitive science of religion (CSR) is an area of research that applies theories and concepts of cognitive science to explain religious thought and behavior. Principal Representatives of the CSR are anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and religious scholars, working with various empirical methodologies including ethnographic observation, polls, and computer simulations. The CSR has established itself as a differentiated approach for the Scientific Study of Religion in the early 90s and from then has been defined as academia by creating several research centers -such as the Institute of Cognition and Culture of the Queen’s University Belfast (Ireland); the program of Religion, Cognition, and Culture of the Aarhus University (Denamark); the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion (USA); and the Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture of the University of British Columbia (Canada)- and through the creation of an international academic society, the International Association for Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR). Research on CSR is published in various journals of religious studies, anthropology and cognitive science, but it appears as an especially prominent subject in the Journal of Cognition and Culture (Brill) and in recent years in publications particularly devoted to this topic, as Religion, Brain, and Behavior (Taylor y Francis) and Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion (Equinox). The article is divided into four sections:
- the CSR standard model;
- main representatives, theories, and notions in CSR;
- evolutionary explanations and CSR;
- critical answers to CSR.
Complete article available here (in Spanish).
