In defense of the comparative method

Numen

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 339-373

  Segal, Robert A ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 1242322656     PISSN: 00295973     EISSN: 15685276     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156852701752245604     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (103)

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27. William F. Albright, Archaeology, Historical Analogy, and Early Biblical Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966);
28. Carl D. Evans, William W. Hallo, and John B. White, eds., Scripture in Context (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1980);
29. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chs. 2, 3;
30. Fitz John Porter Poole, "Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54 (1986): 411-57.
31. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, "On the Comparative Method in Anthropology," in Method and Perspective in Anthropology, ed. Robert F. Spencer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954), 117.
32. Melford E. Spiro, Buddhism and Society, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982 [1970]), xv.
33. "Social Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Comparison," American Anthropologist 56 [1954]: 754).
34. See Bronislaw Malinowski, "Magic, Science and Religion" (1925)
35. "Myth in Primitive Psychology" (1926), both reprinted in his Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1948), 1-71 and 72-124;
36. "A Scientific Theory of Culture," in his A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 3-144.
37. For overviews of this position see Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia:Westminster Press, 1970), esp. 44-50;
38. Robert A. Oden, Jr., The Bible Without Theology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1987]), esp. ch. 1.
39. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 25.
40. Geertz, After the Fact (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 23.
41. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 43.
42. See Ernest Gellner, "The Stakes in Anthropology," American Scholar 57 (1988): 17-30;
43. Melford Spiro, "Cultural Relativismand the Future of Anthropology, "Cultural Anthropology 1 (1986): 259-86.
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45. (rpt. in my Explaining and Interpreting Religion [New York: Peter Lang, 1992], esp. 93-95).
46. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 105-6.
47. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 7-8.
48. Theoretical Anthropology [New York: Columbia University Press, 1953], 427.
49. Bruce M. Metzger, "Considerations of Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity," Harvard Theological Review 48 (1955): 1-20.
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52. See also his Man and His Works (New York: Knopf, 1948), esp. 64.
53. Christianity with Hellenistic religions exactly for finding only differences (Drudgery Divine [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990]).
54. Geertz, After the Fact, 28. See also Geertz, Islam Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
55. WilliamE. Paden, "Elements of a New Comparativism," Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8 [1996]: 9.
56. Paden, ReligiousWorlds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), esp. 162.
57. See J.Z. Smith, 47.
58. (Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964], 295).
59. James George Frazer, "The Scope and Method of Mental Anthropology," in his Garnered Sheaves (London: Macmillan, 1931), 244.
60. On the connection between categorization and explanation see Ernst Mayr and Peter D. Ashlock, Principles of Systematic Zoology, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1991 [1st ed. 1969]) 124-25;
61. Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation And Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965), 453-57.
62. The Interpretation of Cultures, 26-27.
63. W.H. Walsh, "The Intelligibility of History," Philosophy 17 (1942): 128-43;
64. An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, rev. ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1958 [1st ed. 1951]), 23-24, 59-64;
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66. William H. Dray, "'Explaining What' in History," in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: Free Press, 1959), 403-8;
67. "Colligation Under Appropriate Conditions," in Substance and Form in History, eds. Louis Pompa andW.H. Dray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 156-70.
68. Sidney Hook, ed., Philosophy and History, History and Theory 4 1965): 339-41.
69. The locus classicus of this view of explanation is Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1st English ed. (New York: Basic Books; London: Hutchinson, 1959), sec. 12.
70. William Dray: Carl G. Hempel, "The Function of General Laws in History," Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942): 35-48;
71. "Rational Action," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 35 (1962): 5-23;
72. "Explanation in Science and in History," in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, ed. Robert G. Colodny (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 9-33;
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76. Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957);
77. "The Historical Explanation of Actions Reconsidered," in Philosophy and History, ed. Hook, 105-35;
78. "Singular Hypotheticals and Historical Explanation," in Sociological Theory, ed. Llewellyn Gross (New York: Harper& Row, 1967), 181-203;
79. Philosophy of History, 2nd ed., Prentice-HallFoundations of Philosophy Series (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993 [1st ed. 1964]), ch. 1.
80. Patrick Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952);
81. Ernest Nagel, "Some Issues in the Logic of Historical Analysis," Scientific Monthly 74 (1952): 162-69;
82. The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), 547-92;
83. May Brodbeck, "Explanation, Prediction, and 'Imperfect' Knowledge," in Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time, eds. Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, III (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 231-72;
84. Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Torcbbooks, 1964 [1st. ed. 1957; 3rd ed. 1961]), sec. 30;
85. The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966 [1st ed. 1944]), II, ch. 25, sec. 2;
86. W.W. Bartley III, "Achilles, the Tortoise, and Explanation in Science and History," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 13 (1962): 15-33;
87. Carey B. Joynt and Nicholas Rescher, "The Problem of Uniqueness in History," History and Theory 1 (1961): 150- 62;
88. Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), esp. 154, 160-61, 166-68;
89. Alan Donagan, "Explanation in History," Mind 66 (1957): 145-64;
90. "Historical Explanation: the Popper- Hempel Theory Reconsidered," History and Theory 4 (1964): 3-26.
91. See "The Limitations of the Comparative Method," Science, n.s., 4 (1896): 901-8 (rpt.
92. Boas, Race, Language, and Culture [New York: Macmillan, 1940], 270-80).
93. "Determinism and Indeterminismin Modern Science," in Reason and Responsibility, ed. Joel Fineberg, 2nd ed. [Belmont, CA: Dickenson, 1971], 321).
94. person, art, and law in The Interpretation of Cultures, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983)
95. J.G. Frazer, Folk-lore in the Old Testament (London: Macmillan, 1918), I, viiviii.
96. 37William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 2nd ed. (London: A. and C. Black, 1894 [1st ed. 1889]), 14.
97. Frazer, "The Scope and Method of Mental Anthropology," 240-41.
98. J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged ed. (London: Macmillan, 1922), 448.
99. A.H. Sayce, review of Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Academy 36 (November 30, 1889): 357.
100. William Robertson Smith, correspondence, Academy 36 (December 7, 1889): 374.
101. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 48-49.
102. Robert Alun Jones, "Robertson Smith and James Frazer on Religion: Two Traditions in British Social Anthropology," in Functionalism Historicized, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 35-37;
103. Robert Ackerman, J.G. Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 84-85.