Pascal Boyer

Pascal Boyer is a French anthropologist, and Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a Guggenheim Fellow.

Work

He 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 conducted long term ethnographic fieldwork in Africa, where he studied the transmission of oral epics, and has held teaching and research positions at several universities.

Books

• Tradition as Truth and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992. ISBN 9780521374170. http://books.google.com/books?id=C7cu0joBSM8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=pascal+boyer&ct=result#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994. ISBN 9780520075597. http://books.google.com/books?id=5jkhjMvYpa4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=pascal+boyer&ct=result#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2002) Basic Books. ISBN 0465006965.
  • Translated into Greek as Και ο Άνθρωπος Έπλασε τους Θεούς, by Dimitris Xygalatas and Nikolas Roubekas (ISBN 9789602882252).
  • Translated into Polish as "I człowiek stworzył bogów... Jak powstała religia?" (ISBN 8373379851).

See also

• Evolutionary origin of religions
• Evolutionary epistemology
• Evolutionary psychology
• Faith and rationality
• Relationship between religion and science
• Cognitive science of religion
• Evolutionary psychology of religion

External links

• "Why Is Religion Natural?", Sceptical Inquirer, Volume 28.2, March/April 2004
• Book review: Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer