Rethinking the Darwinian and Durkheimian Legacy
in the Context of the Study of Religion
The aim of the present conference is to revisit evolutionary questions with a special focus on the study of religion. We think that progress in the field of cognitive science may enable us to once again raise a number of classic evolutionary questions in a fashion which avoids the pitfalls of the ideologically loaded presumptions of Western and Christian superiority of former days. New insights in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology have provided new opportunities for merging biological and cultural evolutionary perspectives. This combination gives us the unique possibility of once again understanding humans from the Durkheimian perspective of homo duplex, i.e., both natural and cultural beings.
