Commentary Traditions and the Evolution of Premodern Religious and Philosophical Systems: A Cross-Cultural Model (1997).

Parallels in the rise and fall of religious and philosophical traditions are highlighted when those traditions are studied cross-culturally. In literate old-world societies, those parallels included near simultaneities in the initial emergence of abstract theology and philosophy in the mid-first mil...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Comparative Civilizations Review no. 72; pp. 22 - 60
Main Authors:	Farmer, Steve, Henderson, John B., Robinson, Peter
Format:	Article
Published:	International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations Spring2015
Subjects:	History of religion Manners & customs Cross-cultural studies Social history Theology & philosophy
Online Access:	View this record in EBSCOhost

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Summary:	Parallels in the rise and fall of religious and philosophical traditions are highlighted when those traditions are studied cross-culturally. In literate old-world societies, those parallels included near simultaneities in the initial emergence of abstract theology and philosophy in the mid-first millennium BCE and striking similarities in the patterns of growth and decline in cosmological traditions from late-classical to early-modern times. This paper introduces a general model to explain these parallels, integrating crosscultural data with abstract representations of nonlinear dissipative systems.