Edward Slingerland
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 116240 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Edward Slingerland |
| NOMBRES | Edward |
| APELLIDO | Slingerland |
| FIRMA | SLINGERLAND E |
| AFILIACIONES | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6717-7765 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 95 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The Database of Religious History (DRH)
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing designers of large-scale, cross-cultural databases is that of ontology, both in terms of defining the unit of analysis and the construction of an appropriate back-end architecture. These decisions are also impacted by the coding strategies adopted, envisioned users, and funding limitations. This article explores how one particular database project, the Database of Religious History (DRH), has addressed these i…
Magic and Empiricism in Early Chinese Rainmaking
Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia, even in populations with writing and recordkeeping? To address this puzzle, many scholars have argued that these protocols were not instrumental at all and that their practitioners were …
Response to Wesley J. Wildman's Commentary on Edward Slingerland's Drunk by the Author
I want to begin by thanking Prof. Wildman for his incredibly generous and thoughtful review of Drunk. Although pitched as a popular-market trade book, I intended Drunk to also advance academic discussions concerning the role of intoxicants in human sociality, the origins of large-scale cooperation, and the link between intoxicants and ritual and religion. I am delighted to have such an important figure in our field engage with my arguments so car…
Psychology as a Historical Science
Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. Therefore, to understand not only how but also why psychology varies, we need to grapple with cross-temporal variation. The traces of past human cognition accessible through historical texts and artifac…
Supernatural agents and prosociality in historical China
A major source of attention paid to high gods in the fields of cultural evolution and cognitive science is the social effects of belief in high gods. Belief in high gods is both hypothesized to catalyze a cognitive punishment-avoidance mechanism at the level of individual minds, and a group cultural evolutionary mechanism that amplifies in-group cooperation. Recent research into non-Western contexts not only indicates a multiplicity of supernatur…
Historians Respond to Whitehouse et al. (2019), “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History”
As historians, archaeologists, and database analysts affiliated with the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), we share with the Seshat: Global History Databank team, authors of a recent study published in Nature, an excitement about the potential for deep and sustained collaborations between historians and analysts to answer big questions about human history. We have serious concerns, however, by the approach to the quantita…
Coding culture
Mind and Body in Early China
Drawing upon cutting-edge knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Mind and Body in Early China employs the lens of mind-body concepts to critique Orientalist accounts of early China. Views of China as the radical, “holistic” Other are unsupportable for a variety of reasons. The idea that the early Chinese saw no qualitative difference between mind and body (the “strong” holist view) has long been contradicted by traditi…
Michael Hunter. Confucius Beyond the Analects. Leiden
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Modeling the Contested Relationship betweenAnalects, Mencius, andXunzi
This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes "distant reading" methods in the humanities and the authors' corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors' data; discusses complementary relationsh…
The Distant Reading of Religious Texts
This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, “close” textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the “strong” holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative dist…
Durkheim with Data
This article introduces a new online, quantitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history, the Database of Religious History (DRH). The DRH aims to systematically collect information on past religious groups from around the world in a standardized form, providing a novel digital humanities resource for the religious studies community, a forum for scholarly debates, a pedagogical aid, and a platform for testing hypotheses about religious chang…
Interdisciplinary Methods in Chinese Philosophy
Big Gods, historical explanation, and the value of integrating the history of religion into the broader academy
This article discusses critiques raised by historians of religion concerning Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), offering some defense of Norenzayan's position, but also discussing in detail the more substantive challenges. It concludes with some reflections on the current position of the history of religion within the Academy, and an argument for why large-sc…
The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics
Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network
Body and Mind in Early China
This article argues against the strong “holist ” position that the early Chinese lacked any concept of mind–body dualism, and more broadly against a “neo-Orientalist ” trend that portrays Chinese thought as radi-cally different from Western thought. In the first half, it makes the case against strong mind–body holism by drawing upon traditional archeo-logical and textual evidence. In the second, it turns to resources from the sciences, arguing th…
Back to the Future
LIKE MOST RELIGIOUS STUDIES graduate students of my generation, I was assigned Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures in my theories and methods course. As brilliant, eloquent, and constantly re-readable as the essays collected in this volume are, something about them troubled me even back in my grad school days, and I have since come to view this work as a signpost marking the point when religious studies—like many humanistic disciplin…
A Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution
The origin of human ultrasociality—the ability to cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals—has long interested evolutionary and social theorists, but there has been little systematic empirical research on the topic. The Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution, which we introduce in this article, brings the available historical and archaeological data together in a way that will allow hypotheses concerning the origin of…
Religious Studies as a Life Science
Religious studies assumes that religions are naturally occurring phenomena, yet what has scholarship uncovered about this fascinating dimension of the human condition? The manifold reports that classical scholars of religion have gathered extend knowledge, but such knowledge differs from that of scientific scholarship. Classical religious studies scholarship is expansive, but it is not cumulative and progressive. Bucking the expansionist trend, h…
Creating ConsilienceIntegrating the Sciences and the Humanities
This volume takes a new approach to bridging the cultures of science and the humanities. The editors and contributors formulate how to develop a new shared framework of consilience beyond mere interdisciplinarity, in a way that both sides can accept.
The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics
This article argues that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are empirically and conceptually unfounded, as well as that, even if one accepts that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and expanding character traits over time, as well as for managing a variety of situational forces. The …
Confucius meets cognition
Early Chinese Confucian virtue ethics saw effortless harmony with the “Way” as essential for ethical life, but raised the problem of how one can, through effort, reach a state of effortless perfection. We decompose this paradox into three sub-paradoxes and review evidence from cognitive psychology relevant to each of them. First, how can one attain spontaneity by expending effort? Second, how can one come to love what one does not already love? T…
Introductory essay
In this article, we introduce the general rationale behind the evolutionary cognitive science of religion, answer some sensible humanistic objections to it and defend the promise of a ‘consilient’ approach to advance the academic study of religion
What Science Offers the Humanities
What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to take seriously contributions from the natural sciences - and particular research on human cognition - which demonstrate that …
Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network
Durkheim with Data
This article introduces a new online, quantitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history, the Database of Religious History (DRH). The DRH aims to systematically collect information on past religious groups from around the world in a standardized form, providing a novel digital humanities resource for the religious studies community, a forum for scholarly debates, a pedagogical aid, and a platform for testing hypotheses about religious chang…
Who's Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science
This paper aims to defend the application of tools and knowledge drawn from the natural sciences to the study of religion from the common charge that such approaches are overly “reductionistic.” I will argue that “reductionism” is ultimately an empty term of abuse—any explanation worthy of being called an explanation involves reductionism of some sort. Drawing upon the work of Charles Taylor, I will try to explain what “good,” non-eliminative red…
Virtue Ethics, The Analects, and the Problem of Commensurability
In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the Analects than other possible models, the author uses a structural outline of a virtue ethic (derived from Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the Aristotlelian tradition) to organize a discussion of the text. The resulting interpretation focuses attention on the religious aspects of Confucianism and accounts for aspects of the text that ar…
Magic and Empiricism in Early Chinese Rainmaking
Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia, even in populations with writing and recordkeeping? To address this puzzle, many scholars have argued that these protocols were not instrumental at all and that their practitioners were …
Body and Mind in Early China
This article argues against the strong “holist ” position that the early Chinese lacked any concept of mind–body dualism, and more broadly against a “neo-Orientalist ” trend that portrays Chinese thought as radi-cally different from Western thought. In the first half, it makes the case against strong mind–body holism by drawing upon traditional archeo-logical and textual evidence. In the second, it turns to resources from the sciences, arguing th…
A Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution
The origin of human ultrasociality—the ability to cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals—has long interested evolutionary and social theorists, but there has been little systematic empirical research on the topic. The Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution, which we introduce in this article, brings the available historical and archaeological data together in a way that will allow hypotheses concerning the origin of…
Collision with China
Recent research suggests that cultural differences in Chinese and Western modes of conceptual reasoning play a significant role in political discourse and relations between the United States and China. In contrast, our analysis of the discourse surrounding the 2001 collision of an American surveillance plane with a Chinese fighter jet over international waters reveals a surprisingly high degree of similarity in conceptual metaphors used across th…
Conceptual blending, somatic marking, and normativity
One purpose of this article is to support the universalist claims of conceptual blending theory by documenting its application to an ancient Chinese philosophical text, and also to provide illustrations of complex multiple-scope blends constructed over the course of conceptual blending by suggesting that, in many cases, the primary purpose of achieving human scale is not to help us apprehend a situation, but rather to help us to know how too feel…
Coding culture
The Distant Reading of Religious Texts
This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, “close” textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the “strong” holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative dist…
Religious Studies as a Life Science
Religious studies assumes that religions are naturally occurring phenomena, yet what has scholarship uncovered about this fascinating dimension of the human condition? The manifold reports that classical scholars of religion have gathered extend knowledge, but such knowledge differs from that of scientific scholarship. Classical religious studies scholarship is expansive, but it is not cumulative and progressive. Bucking the expansionist trend, h…
Introductory essay
In this article, we introduce the general rationale behind the evolutionary cognitive science of religion, answer some sensible humanistic objections to it and defend the promise of a ‘consilient’ approach to advance the academic study of religion
Response to Cho and Squier
Journal Article Response to Cho and Squier Get access Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition, The University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 76, Issue 2, Ju…
Modeling the Contested Relationship betweenAnalects, Mencius, andXunzi
This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes "distant reading" methods in the humanities and the authors' corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors' data; discusses complementary relationsh…
Effortless Action
Effortless Action: The Chinese Spiritual Ideal of Wu-wei Get access Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland Assistant Professor in the Departments of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA 90089 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 68, Issue 2, June 2000, Pages 293–328, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaare…
Effortless action
Virtue Ethics, The Analects, and the Problem of Commensurability
In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the Analects than other possible models, the author uses a structural outline of a virtue ethic (derived from Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the Aristotlelian tradition) to organize a discussion of the text. The resulting interpretation focuses attention on the religious aspects of Confucianism and accounts for aspects of the text that ar…
Effortless Action
This book presents a systematic account of the role of the personal spiritual ideal of wu-wei--literally "no doing," but better rendered as "effortless action"--in early Chinese thought. Edward Slingerland's analysis shows that wu-wei represents the most general of a set of conceptual metaphors having to do with a state of effortless ease and unself-consciousness. This concept of effortlessness, he contends, serves as a common ideal for both Daoi…
Zhu Xi's Reading of the Analects
The Ambivalence of Creation
Journal of Chinese PhilosophyVolume 31, Issue 1 p. 131-134 The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China Edward Slingerland, Edward Slingerland University of Southern CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author Edward Slingerland, Edward Slingerland University of Southern CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 February 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0301-8121.2004.147_2.xRe…
Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion
Journal Article Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion Get access Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 72, Issue 1, March 2004, Pages 1–31, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfh002 Published: 01 March 2004
Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion
Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion Get access Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 72, Issue 1, March 2004, Pages 1–31, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfh002 Published: 01 March 2004
Conceptual blending, somatic marking, and normativity
One purpose of this article is to support the universalist claims of conceptual blending theory by documenting its application to an ancient Chinese philosophical text, and also to provide illustrations of complex multiple-scope blends constructed over the course of conceptual blending by suggesting that, in many cases, the primary purpose of achieving human scale is not to help us apprehend a situation, but rather to help us to know how too feel…
Collision with China
Recent research suggests that cultural differences in Chinese and Western modes of conceptual reasoning play a significant role in political discourse and relations between the United States and China. In contrast, our analysis of the discourse surrounding the 2001 collision of an American surveillance plane with a Chinese fighter jet over international waters reveals a surprisingly high degree of similarity in conceptual metaphors used across th…
What Science Offers the Humanities
What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to take seriously contributions from the natural sciences - and particular research on human cognition - which demonstrate that …
The Problem of Moral Spontaneity in the Guodian Corpus
Reply to Cho and Squier
CHO AND SQUIER take my Buddhist “two truths” analogy in an unintended way when they read it as implying that I view the physicalist position as “absolute truth.” As I made clear in my piece, physicalism should not be viewed as absolute truth, but as the best working explanation of the world that we currently have. As for the claim that we “do not really understand the science” of evolutionary theory (5), this seems to me simply false. There are c…
Who's Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science
This paper aims to defend the application of tools and knowledge drawn from the natural sciences to the study of religion from the common charge that such approaches are overly “reductionistic.” I will argue that “reductionism” is ultimately an empty term of abuse—any explanation worthy of being called an explanation involves reductionism of some sort. Drawing upon the work of Charles Taylor, I will try to explain what “good,” non-eliminative red…
Response to Cho and Squier
Journal Article Response to Cho and Squier Get access Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition, The University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 76, Issue 2, Ju…
Creating ConsilienceIntegrating the Sciences and the Humanities
This volume takes a new approach to bridging the cultures of science and the humanities. The editors and contributors formulate how to develop a new shared framework of consilience beyond mere interdisciplinarity, in a way that both sides can accept.
The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics
This article argues that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are empirically and conceptually unfounded, as well as that, even if one accepts that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and expanding character traits over time, as well as for managing a variety of situational forces. The …
Confucius meets cognition
Early Chinese Confucian virtue ethics saw effortless harmony with the “Way” as essential for ethical life, but raised the problem of how one can, through effort, reach a state of effortless perfection. We decompose this paradox into three sub-paradoxes and review evidence from cognitive psychology relevant to each of them. First, how can one attain spontaneity by expending effort? Second, how can one come to love what one does not already love? T…
Introductory essay
In this article, we introduce the general rationale behind the evolutionary cognitive science of religion, answer some sensible humanistic objections to it and defend the promise of a ‘consilient’ approach to advance the academic study of religion
Back to the Future
LIKE MOST RELIGIOUS STUDIES graduate students of my generation, I was assigned Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures in my theories and methods course. As brilliant, eloquent, and constantly re-readable as the essays collected in this volume are, something about them troubled me even back in my grad school days, and I have since come to view this work as a signpost marking the point when religious studies—like many humanistic disciplin…
A Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution
The origin of human ultrasociality—the ability to cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals—has long interested evolutionary and social theorists, but there has been little systematic empirical research on the topic. The Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution, which we introduce in this article, brings the available historical and archaeological data together in a way that will allow hypotheses concerning the origin of…
Religious Studies as a Life Science
Religious studies assumes that religions are naturally occurring phenomena, yet what has scholarship uncovered about this fascinating dimension of the human condition? The manifold reports that classical scholars of religion have gathered extend knowledge, but such knowledge differs from that of scientific scholarship. Classical religious studies scholarship is expansive, but it is not cumulative and progressive. Bucking the expansionist trend, h…
Body and Mind in Early China
This article argues against the strong “holist ” position that the early Chinese lacked any concept of mind–body dualism, and more broadly against a “neo-Orientalist ” trend that portrays Chinese thought as radi-cally different from Western thought. In the first half, it makes the case against strong mind–body holism by drawing upon traditional archeo-logical and textual evidence. In the second, it turns to resources from the sciences, arguing th…
The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics
Impartial Institutions, Pathogen Stress and the Expanding Social Network
Epistemology (30 obras) · Philosophy (28 obras) · Sociology (25 obras) · Chinese history and philosophy (16 obras) · Psychology (13 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · History (11 obras) · Law (11 obras) · China (9 obras)