This is a comprehensive and intriguing volume that addresses the academic gap of disregarding animistic worldviews within the discipline of philosophy of religion. This discipline has significantly focused on monotheistic traditions and worldviews centered on a transcendental God while largely overlooking animistic traditions since it is often shaped by western, colonial, and theistic assumptions concerning the definition of religion. This book argues in favor of the philosophical analysis of animism and suggests that exclusion of the same is a disciplinary bias that could be intellectually limiting and culturally myopic. The book explores major topics of defining animism, analyzing the beliefs and practices of animism, interpreting the relational aspects between animism, naturalism, and science, and introspecting the larger question of whether animism should be considered earnestly as an academic pursuit. The book is a collection of fourteen chapters with an introduction. These chapters investigate animism from the lenses of anthropological, cognitive, epistemological, and metaphysical perspectives. The first chapter talks about the interaction between animism and the cognitive science of religion (CSR) where animism is understood as cognitive illusions or by-products of evolved cognitive mechanisms. The chapter following that critiques the CSR approach to animism. The next three chapters following that discuss the conceptual framework of animism beginning with the modernist conception of animism and moving toward the contemporary conception of animism. The chapters look at the nineteenth-century modernist scholars like Edward Burnett Tylor and his understanding of animism which was based on an evolutionary perspective and loaded with colonial terminology casting the term animism in a negative light. However, deconstruction of the older understanding of animism and construction of a new insight on animism from a relational ontology in indigenous societies was done by contemporary scholars of animism. Subsequent chapters discuss the intercommunication of animism with naturalism and science. In these chapters, there is an attempt to show that animism can be compatible with a scientific worldview, there is an epistemic defense that takes animistic experiences seriously within their cultural and perceptual contexts and a discourse of childhood animism that builds on the developmental evidence that animistic intuitions may be innate and deeply rooted in human psychology rather than it being a cultural oddity. The last few chapters analyze animism with regard to the contemporary society where agency and personhood can be attributed to robots and artificial intelligence and the importance and immediacy of animism in the Anthropocene era. The book is a brilliant contribution to the often dismissed discourse on animism and offers a pluralistic and intellectually rigorous perspective on why animistic worldviews should be pursued by the philosophy of religion. It is a highly recommended read for the students of Religious Studies and also other disciplines of the social sciences.
Alisha Saikia (Mon,) studied this question.
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