Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures) [Paperback]

Stanley J. Tambiah (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 1990 | ISBN-10: 0521376319 | ISBN-13: 978-0521376310

Professor Tambiah is one of the leading anthropologists of the day, particularly known for his penetrating and scholarly studies of Buddhism. In this accessible and illuminating book he deals with the classical opposition of magic with science and religion. He reviews the great debates in classical Judaism, early Greek science, Renaissance philosophy, the Protestant Reformation, and the scientific revolution, and then reconsiders the three major interpretive approaches to magic in anthropology: the intellectualist and evolutionary theories of Tylor and Frazer, Malinowski's functionalism, and Lévy-Bruhl's philosophical anthropology, which posited a distinction between mystical and logical mentalities. He follows with a wide-ranging and suggestive discussion of rationality and relativism and concludes with a discussion of new thinking in the history and philosophy of science, suggesting fresh perspectives on the classical opposition between science and magic.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...this book will be of immense benefit to all those involved in the study of the mental and cultural life of humankind." Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"This enormously erudite but engaging study offers a tough, critical, and morally sensitive perspective on the history of central issues in anthropological theory. More than either a theoretical manifesto or a philosophical disquisition, it makes the anthropological project and the history of ideas mutually relevant to a degree rarely achieved before now." Choice

Book Description

Three major interpretative approaches to magic in anthropology follow a review of the great debates in classical Judaism, early Greek science, Renaissance philosophy, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (March 30, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521376319
• ISBN-13: 978-0521376310
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #778,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tambiah's internal framework of science schemata, April 15, 2004

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Scott MacLeod (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures) (Paperback)

Concerning Tambiah's inquiry into science in this book:

In "Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality," Harvard anthropologist Stanley Tambiah examines the logic and sociology of scientific inquiry. Tambiah identifies (see figure on page 141) the internal framework of scientific inquiry as a collection of relations between, on the one hand, bodies of specialized knowledge (rectangles) and, -- on the other, subdisciplines, specializations with conventions and "rules of the game" (ovals) accepted by peer groups and professional associations.

Tambiah suggests

"that the Western conception of science as a labeled, self-conscious and reflexive activity of experimentation, measurement and verification matured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, that at this time there was a decisive separating off of Christianity (Protestantism) from science, and the repudiation of a third realm of activity as magic. . . . A very critical precondition of modern science was the contribution of early Greece. According to the classicists it was in early Greece that the systematization of the rules of demonstration and proof was begun, and the marking off of nature as the domain of regular laws of causality was achieved (p. 140)."

While Tambiah's historical explanation situates science in relation to magic and religion, the chart on page 141 is schematically useful to orient the internal framework of science in relation to external frameworks (of special contemporary interest), namely to 1) technological applications and interventions in society, 2) the social construction of knowledge / cosmological and ideological belief systems, 3) soico-political and economic interests in society, and 4) the impact of "external history." To gain useful purchase on the sociology of science, see this chart / figure.