Religion, Neuroscience and the Human Mind

FYSEMR 63E Subject & Catalog Number

Description

More than 160 years after Darwin’s epochal account of evolution, some 75-85% of the world’s 8.2 billion people are religious, and the percentage is growing. What does religion do for human beings?  What does an evolutionary and biologically informed understanding of the mind and brain lead us to think about where religion fits in human life? Harvard’s first psychologist, William James, engaged these questions in the late 19th century, bringing the cutting edge of empirical psychology to the philosophy of religion. Today these same questions animate neuroscience, where researchers are showing how affectivity, emotions and our evolutionary past come together to form the “self” philosophers have long thought to be primarily “rational,” and to drive our perception and behavior.

This seminar brings together the thought of James, writing at the turn of the 20th century, with the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and others today, to ask what kinds of beings we are, how our minds function, and what religion contributes to human individual and societal experience? The seminar takes up philosophy of belief, affect, and emotion, and touches on the biology of the brain and homeostasis. It treats the history of philosophy by comparing James with Damasio and others. We conclude assessing some contemporary views of religion from evolutionary psychology (Boyer, Atran), cultural anthropology (Geertz, Luhrmann, Asad), and contemporary neuroscience of religion in light of James’s and Damasio’s models of the human mind. 

NOTE: This seminar will meet Mondays, 3:30pm-5:30pm.

NOTE: There will be a museum visit to Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments and a special collections visit to Houghton Library. In addition, we will have a class dinner at conclusion of the seminar.