Contemporary Approaches to the Study of the History of Religions
-From 1945 to the Present-
While the history of people's interest in religions other than their own spans thousands of years in both East and West, the beginning of the history of religions as a modern scientific discipline is generally considered to be the lecture given by Max Müller at the Royal Institution on February 18, 1870, in the second half of the nineteenth century and later published as Introduction to the Science of Religion in 1873. Throughout this and subsequent periods, the history of religions gradually struggled to break free from the dominance of theology and other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
As a result of this effort to break free, the history of religions began to establish itself as an independent discipline. While addressing its own areas of expertise and related problems, it began to theoretically consider methods that would distinguish it from other disciplines that dealt with these areas. This growing body of knowledge in the field of study provides the basis for the emergence of new approaches aimed at addressing the weaknesses inherent in the historical method applied to the study of religion in understanding religious phenomena and at understanding the subject within its various dimensions.
Each of the texts in this book has been written by experts in the field and provides an evaluative account of existing or emerging approaches to the study of religion after the Second World War, the variations in these approaches, and the works written in the field of history of religions within the context of these approaches.
The purpose of such a compilation is to inform Turkish history of religions scholars and intellectuals interested in the field about the accumulation of theoretical discussions and serious studies that have been conducted, the majority of which have been conducted outside of Turkey and whose absence is seriously felt in the history of religions studies in Turkey.
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