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OriginsNet |
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| Researching the Origins of Art. Religion, and Mind | |||||
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Glossary/Methods
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| C O N T E N T S
Overview of Four Eras of Evolution ,,,,,Oldowan ,,,,,Early Paleolithic ,,,,,Middle Paleolithic .....Upper Paleolithic |
History of Religions - A field within the discipline of Religious Studies, concerned with both the history and meaning of religious phenomena, attempting to do justice to both without sacrificng either, and to systematize the results and to reflect on the structure of the religious phenomena as such. "The greatest claim to merit of the history of religions is precisely its effort to decipher in a 'fact', conditioned as it is by the historical moment and the cultural style of the epoch, the existential situation that made it possible." "The historian of religion is a hermeneutist." "Since man is a homo symbolicus, and all his activities involve symbolism, it follows that all religious facts have a symbolic character." "All religious symbols have a multivalent and transcendent meaning" and "in order to decipher it, it is necessary to take into consideration all of its contexts . . . and in what we might call its 'maturity.'" Eliade, M. (1959). Methodological remarks on the study of religious symbolism. In M. Eliade and J. Kitagawa (ed.) The history of religions: Essays in methodology, pp. 86-107. Chicago: University of Chicago. |
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