Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

by Anne Warfield Rawls

• ISBN13: 9780521651455
• ISBN10: 052165145X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In this original and controversial book Professor Rawls argues that Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is the crowning achievement of his sociological endeavour and that since its publication in English in 1915 it has been consistently misunderstood. Rather than a work on primitive religion or the sociology of knowledge, Rawls asserts that it is an attempt by Durkheim to establish a unique epistemological basis for the study of sociology and moral relations. By privileging social practice over beliefs and ideas, it avoids the dilemmas inherent in philosophical approaches to knowledge and morality that are based on individualism and the tendency to privilege beliefs and ideas over practices, both tendencies that dominate western thought. Based on detailed textual analysis of the primary text, this book will be an important and original contribution to contemporary debates on social theory and philosophy.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Durkheim's argument in the introductory chapter of the Elementary Forms of Religion

3. Durkheim's dualism: an anti-Kantian, anti-rationalist position

4. Sacred and Profane: the first classificaiton

5.Totemism and the problem of individulaism

6. The origin of moral force

7. The primacy of rites in causality

8. Imitative rites and the category of causality

9. The category of causality

10. Durkheim's conclusion

the categories

Conclusion.