The Oxford Handbook of Atheism

Front Cover
Stephen Bullivant, Michael Ruse
OUP Oxford, 2013 - Philosophy - 763 pages
Recent books by, among others, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have thrust atheism firmly into the popular, media, and academic spotlight. This so-called New Atheism is arguably the most striking development in western socio-religious culture of the past decade or more. As such, it has spurred fertile (and often heated) discussions both within, and between, a diverse range of disciplines. Yet atheism, and the New Atheism, are by no means co-extensive. Interesting though it indeed is, the New Atheism is a single, historically and culturally specific manifestation of positive atheism (the belief that there is/are no God/s), which is itself but one form of a far deeper, broader, and more significant global phenomenon. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism is a pioneering edited volume, exploring atheism - understood in the broad sense of 'an absence of belief in the existence of a God or gods' - in all the richness and diversity of its historical and contemporary expressions. Bringing together an international team of established and emerging scholars, it probes the varied manifestations and implications of unbelief from an array of disciplinary perspectives (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, demography, psychology, natural sciences, gender and sexuality studies, literary criticism, film studies, musicology) and in a range of global contexts (Western Europe, North America, post-communist Europe, the Islamic world, Japan, India). Both surveying and synthesizing previous work, and presenting the major fruits of innovative recent research, the handbook is set to be a landmark text for the study of atheism.
 

Contents

The Study of Atheism Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse
1
PART I DEFINITIONS AND DEBATES
9
PART II HISTORY OF WESTERN ATHEISM
137
PART III WORLDVIEWS AND SYSTEMS
261
PART IV ATHEISM AND THE NATURAL SCIENCES
381
PART V ATHEISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
449
PART VI GLOBAL EXPRESSIONS
551
PART VII ATHEISM AND THE ARTS
681
Index
735
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