Tag: Belief

Free Download Duane J. Corpis, "Crossing the Boundaries of Belief: Geographies of Religious Conversion in Southern Germany, 1648-1800"
English | 2014 | ISBN: 0813935520 | EPUB | pages: 328 | 0.7 mb
In early modern Germany, religious conversion was a profoundly social and political phenomenon rather than purely an act of private conscience. Because social norms and legal requirements demanded that every subject declare membership in one of the state-sanctioned Christian churches, the act of religious conversion regularly tested the geographical and political boundaries separating Catholics and Protestants. In a period when church and state cooperated to impose religious conformity, regulate confessional difference, and promote moral and social order, the choice to convert was seen as a disruptive act of disobedience. Investigating the tensions inherent in the creation of religious communities and the fashioning of religious identities in Germany after the Thirty Years’ War, Duane Corpis examines the complex social interactions, political implications, and cultural meanings of conversion in this moment of German history.

Free Download The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief By James Wood
2010 | 304 Pages | ISBN: 0312429568 | EPUB | 1 MB
Published when he was thirty-three, The Broken Estate is the first book of essays by the man who would become one of America’s most esteemed literary critics.Ranging in subject from Jane Austen to John Updike, this collection introduced American readers to a new kind of humanist criticism. Wood is committed to judging literature through its connection with the soul, its appeal to our appetites and identities, and he examines his subjects rigorously, without ever losing sight of the mysterious human impulse that has made these works valuable to generations of readers.

Free Download Marilyn Dunn, "Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe c. 350-700"
English | ISBN: 1441165320 | 2014 | 248 pages | EPUB | 817 KB
This ground-breaking study offers a new paradigm for understanding the beliefs and religions of the Goths, Burgundians, Sueves, Franks and Lombards as they converted from paganism to Christianity between c.350 and c.700 CE. Combining history and theology with approaches drawn from the cognitive science of religion, Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe uses both written and archaeological evidence to challenge many older ideas. Beginning with a re-examination of our knowledge about the deities and rituals of their original religions, it goes on to question the assumption that the Germanic peoples were merely passive recipients of Christian doctrine, arguing that so-called ‘Arianism’ was first developed as an ‘entry-level’ Christianity for the Goths.

Free Download Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age
English | 2024 | ISBN: 1009477226 | 482 Pages | PDF | 2.3 MB
In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. ‘We are apt’, says Hume, ‘to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole form of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operation in a different manner, from what it does at present.’ This encapsulates, observes Peter Harrison, the disjuncture between contemporary Western culture and medieval societies. In the Middle Ages, people saw the hand of God at work everywhere. Indeed, many suppose that ‘belief in the supernatural’ is likewise fundamental nowadays to religious commitment. But dichotomising between ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’ is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, just as the notion of ‘belief’ emerged historically late. In this masterful contribution to intellectual history, the author overturns crucial misconceptions – ‘myths’ – about secular modernity, challenging common misunderstandings of the past even as he reinvigorates religious thinking in the present.

Free Download Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief By Jordan B. Peterson
1999 | 564 Pages | ISBN: 0415922216 | PDF | 8 MB
Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself? From the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos comes a provocative hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated. A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.

Free Download Theorizing the Anthropology of Belief: Magic, Conspiracies, and Misinformation
English | 2024 | ISBN: 1032420324 | 107 Pages | PDF (True) | 2 MB
The first part of the book examines different methods for generating valid anthropological knowledge and proposes a shift in current consensus. Drawing on Western scholars of antiquity and the medieval period and moving away from 20th-century theorists, it argues that we must first make ontological assumptions about the kinds of things that can exist (or not) before we can then develop epistemologies that study those kinds of things. The book goes on to apply the ontology-first theory to a set of case studies in modern day conspiracy theories, misinformation, and magical thinking. It asserts that we need to move away from unneeded metaphysical assumptions of conspiracy theories being misinformation and argues that reconstructing particular historical events can be a fruitful zone for application of quantitative methods to humanistic questions.

Free Download Daniel J. Singer, "Right Belief and True Belief"
English | ISBN: 019766038X | 2023 | 256 pages | PDF | 2 MB

Free Download A Textbook of Belief Dynamics: Solutions to exercises By Sven Ove Hansson (auth.)
1999 | 65 Pages | ISBN: 0792353293 | PDF | 3 MB
The mid-1980s saw the discovery of logical tools that make it possible to model changes in belief and knowledge in entirely new ways. These logical tools turned out to be applicable to both human beliefs and to the contents of databases. Philosophers, logicians, and computer scientists have contributed to making this interdisciplinary field one of the most exciting in the cognitive scientists – and one that is expanding rapidly. This, the first textbook in the new area, contains both discursive chapters with a minimum of formalism and formal chapters in which proofs and proof methods are presented. Using different selections from the formal sections, according to the author’s detailed advice, allows the book to be used at all levels of university education. A supplementary volume contains solutions to the 210 exercises. The volume’s unique, comprehensive coverage means that it can also be used by specialists in the field of belief dynamics and related areas, such as non-monotonic reasoning and knowledge representation.

Free Download Alison James, "The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief "
English | ISBN: 0367635151 | 2023 | 522 pages | EPUB, PDF | 4 MB + 11 MB

Free Download Paul Herrick, "Philosophy, Reasoned Belief, and Faith: An Introduction"
English | ISBN: 0268202680 | 2022 | 474 pages | EPUB | 1036 KB