Pascal Boyer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pascal Boyer (fl. c. 2000) is an anthropologist who advocates the idea that human instincts provide us with the basis for an intuitive theory of mind that guides our social relations, morality, and predilections toward religious beliefs. Boyer and others propose that these innate mental systems make human beings predisposed to certain cultural elements such as belief in supernatural beings.

Boyer has held teaching and research positions at several universities. He is currently Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

[edit] Books

• Tradition as Truth and Communication (1992) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (1994) Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2002) Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00696-5.

[edit] See also

• Origin of religion
• Evolutionary epistemology
• Evolutionary psychology
• The Mickey Mouse Problem
• Faith and rationality
• Relationship between religion and science
• Cognitive science of religion
• Evolutionary psychology of religion

[edit] Links

• Official home page
• Faculty page at Washington University