Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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52. Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby, 130.
53. Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 11. Because leisure, as Pieper uses the term, is the quintessential relaxed field, it clearly overlaps with the meaning of play. In fact Pieper’s whole book could be seen as a meditation on play as discussed in this concluding chapter.
54. It could be that it is related to episodic consciousness in Donald’s terms, which in Chapter 3 I have related to unitive consciousness.
55. Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002 [1995]), 78. My discussion of Aristotle draws heavily from Hadot’s chapter on Aristotle in this book, 77-90.
56. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 82.
57. Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione Animalium, trans. I. D. M. Balm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 18, 645a.
58. Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), chap. 6, 95-108.
59. The word “school,” which has meant educational institutions through most of history, has taken on the secondary meaning of traditions of teaching, though in Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum the two meanings came together. Josef Pieper, however, in Leisure, chap. 4, reminds us that the root meaning of school, that is, skole in Greek or scola in Latin, is leisure. Leisure points to education as taking place in a relaxed field, as having an element of play. In our society, “school” has become the site of intense and sometimes cutthroat competition, so we may have difficulty in seeing it as “leisure.” However, in most historical societies only a small minority went to “school”; the others went to work as soon as they were physically able. So education as leisure made sense. Even when it is democratized it still makes sense that education should take place in an atmosphere of leisure if its true purpose, human flourishing, is to be its result.
60. Probably Spinoza is the most famous of those expelled from the synagogue. He survived only because he had supporters in the non-Jewish community.
61. Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
62. See McCarthy, Race, Empire, chap. 2, “Kant on Race and Development,” 42-68.
63. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
64. Quotations from Mill, On Liberty, in McCarthy, Race, Empire, 168, 172, 180.
65. Ibid., 153.
66. See particularly ibid., the final chapter, 230-243.
67. Ibid., 241-242.
68. Ibid., 224-225. McCarthy has written a strikingly original book that is an extremely valuable resource for thinking about our current problems. But besides his indebtedness to Kant, of whom he is hardly uncritical, he draws significantly from Jurgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, as he acknowledges.
69. Niles Eldredge, “The Sixth Extinction,” act ionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2 .html, 1.
70. Ibid., 2.
71. Ibid., 3-4.
72. Ibid., 4-5.
73. Ibid., 5.
74. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 898.
75. For a fuller discussion of Weber’s views on religion, see Robert N. Bellah, “Max Weber and World-Denying Love,” in The RobertBellah Reader, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 123-149.
76. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953 [1949]). For a recent, very useful interpretation of the axial age and its relevance to modernity, see Steven G. Smith, Appeal andAttitude: Prospects for Ultimate Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
77. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Towarda World Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981).
78. Charles Taylor, A SecularAge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
79. Herbert Fingarette, The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and the Life of the Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 236-237. Can we see a special kind of “renouncer” in Fingarette?
80. McCarthy, Race, Empire, 223. Italics in the original.
81. Ibid., 187.