Религиозное чувство: у истоков континентального религиоведения

M. : Higher School of Economics Publishing House, 2025.

Zolotukhin V. V.

This book describes the emergence of religious studies as a special field of humanities in 19th-century continental Europe. The is emergence was made possible by a unique set of circumstances in the 18th century: capitalist secularisation as well as the corresponding transformations in German Protestant theology. Kant’s delimitation of knowledge by experience left the defenders of religiosity with only psychological arguments, and so religious sentimentalism developed. The doctrine of religious feeling that emerged in Pietism and Kantian criticism were the first conditions for the emergence of religious studies. The respect for accurate knowledge also played an important role. In its endeavour to ground the psychological argument empirically and introspectively, as well as to support religion with the data of history and linguistics, sentimentalism brought Protestant theology closer to the cutting edge of science at the time. Philosophers of religious feeling were driven by the unfulfilled dream of finding indisputable evidence in favour of the inalienable presence (not reducible to anything else) of religiosity in the human race, while theologians were also interested in justifying the superiority of Liberal Protestantism. The growing outlook in Asian and African Studies implied an increasing inclusivism, which, together with the development of biblical criticism, meant that religious studies, the passion fruit of modernity and theology, sought to eliminate the theological assumptions without which it could not have originated. 
The publication is addressed to philosophers, religious scholars, and a wide range of interested readers.

Keywords: философия