The Feeling of Believing: The Importance of Affectivity in the Rehabilitation of Belief

The last half-century of religious studies scholarship has seen the diminishing importance of belief as a concept of analysis. The putative inaccessibility of beliefs and the concept’s Western Christian provenance has led many scholars of religion to reject the concept. Recent years have seen attemp...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Implicit religion
Main Author: Williams, Jack (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Equinox 2022
In: Implicit religion
Year: 2022, Volume: 25, Issue: 1/2, Pages: 77-101
Further subjects:B Belief
B Enactivism
B Affectivity
B Kevin Schilbrack
B Religious Belief
B Philosophy of religion
B Power
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Summary:The last half-century of religious studies scholarship has seen the diminishing importance of belief as a concept of analysis. The putative inaccessibility of beliefs and the concept’s Western Christian provenance has led many scholars of religion to reject the concept. Recent years have seen attempts to rehabilitate the concept of belief, including Kevin Schilbrack’s 2014 Philosophy and the Study of Religions. Schilbrack proposes that by engaging with contemporary philosophical reflection on belief—specifically dispositionalist and interpretationist theories—the traditional critiques of belief can be overcome. The purpose of this paper is to further develop this approach by proposing an additional, currently overlooked, element of belief—its affectivity. This approach builds on current research from enactivist cognitive science and avoids the objections traditionally levelled at belief, while enabling a more sophisticated analysis of power dynamics in religion
ISSN:1743-1697
Contains:Enthalten in: Implicit religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1558/imre.24340