Michel Meulders. Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience (Laurence Garey, Trans. and Ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 252 pp. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0262014489
✍ Scribed by Douglas C. Creelman
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2011
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 106 KB
- Volume
- 47
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Guy G. Stroumsa is a widely published scholar on religion in antiquity. The present book studies the history of his discipline, the comparative study of religion, in what Stroumsa finds its very beginning, the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book is of interest to scholars in other human sciences for at least three reasons: the approach taken, the claims made for the history of the human sciences, and most important, the significance of the topic of religion for understanding human action.
The approach is Kuhnian, with Stroumsa's narrative framed in terms of a paradigm shift that occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century, which he calls an "intellectual revolution": "the epistemological foundation of the new cognitive structures invented for understanding religious phenomena" (p. 5). He draws parallels with "the birth of modern psychology in the same period" (p. 170), citing the work of Vidal (2006). This paradigm continued until the mid-nineteenth century, when, "with the formation of modern scholarly disciplines, the study of religions . . . could not retain its essentially interdisciplinary character" (p. 164). The history serves another purpose as well, as Stroumsa states that "the history of a discipline [in the humanities] remains a must for any epistemological reflections" (p. 113). The ultimate aim of this history, however, is announced on the first page: "The religious explosion of the present day, with the urgency of its immediate threats, has taken us by surprise" (p. vii). This explosion, then, frames the questions that the book seeks to answer.
The title nods to Vico's New Science, but this book is not about Vico, except incidentally. It is rather about "the views developed in some of the books in Vico's library" (p. 4). Indeed, the publication of the first edition of La scienza nuova in 1724 marks the midpoint of the time studied in the book, from roughly 1614 to 1794. In 1614, Isaac Casaubon "effectively tore down the Renaissance holistic conception of religious history" (p. 4); 1794 saw Charles Dupuis' study that sought a single origin of all religions. This period was not, however, only forged by groundbreaking texts. Three events produced a cultural crisis leading to the reworking of the category of religion: European encounters with the peoples of the Americas, and especially Peru, but also China and elsewhere; the Renaissance, with its interest in antiquity; and the religious wars, which served to relativize claims of one true faith. The outcome, according to Stroumsa, was the "development of a single concept of religion" (p. 7), in place of the older category of true versus false religions. With the new category came a conception of the unity of humankind.
Stroumsa presents the details of this narrative with studies of the major figures and texts in several areas, introducing (for this reviewer) some extraordinary individuals in the process. Chapters deal with efforts to understand the religious practices in Peru-to what could the Europeans compare them? The result was the emergence of a comparative approach to religion. Following is a chapter devoted to the beginnings of the historical critical approach, with interest in ancient Judaism, and to a historical comparison of the Bible and Homer. Interest among Christians in contemporary Judaism is also presented, with special attention to the work of Richard Simon, who made the "first scholarly comparison of Judaism and Christianity" (p. 70), with an ethnological approach in the ascendant. Chapter 4 deals with