Abstract

Cognitive science of religion represents a significant stream in the current academic study of religion. It can also be considered a critical reaction to the phenomenology of religion, which converged religious studies on confessional approaches. For a long time, the protectionist paradigm, represented above all by the aforementioned phenomenology of religion, prevailed in the study of religion. Therefore, there was a strong need to revive the naturalistic approach to the study of religion and to base research on scientific foundations. Cognitive science of religion has committed itself to the so-called second wave of consilience and seeks to integrate the methodology of natural sciences into the research of religion (naturalism, reductionism, explanation, experiment, hypothesis-driven research). The comparison of the perspective of the phenomenology of religion with the findings of the cognitive science of religion will be illustrated by the case of dance. It will directly show how the choice of one or the other theoretical framework significantly affects the whole research. The difference is not only in the way the problem is considered but especially the explanatory potential and verifiability of the results.

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