bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Historical Genesis of Cognitive Science of Religion
Authors: Lawson E. Thomas 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter focuses on the relationship between comparative religion and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences culminating in the development of the cognitive science of religion. It discusses what problems comparative religion was trying to solve and how the cognitive science of religion addressed those problems thorough theoretical and experimental work. In particular this chapter describes and analyzes the problems that comparative religion was trying to solve within the limitations of its methods and relates these to the problems that the cognitive science of religion was focusing upon. The chapter also describes the successful emergence of the standard model of the cognitive science of religion and explains the reasons for its success. The chapter ends with a discussion of the merits and limitations of the cognitive science of religion and suggest new directions for this emerging discipline.
The Failure of Religious Systems
Authors: Turpin Hugh , Lanman Jonathan A. 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter describes how recent work across the social and cognitive sciences can address the question of how religious systems come to fail. It begins by discussing whether it makes scientific sense to talk about “religious systems” before outlining how the success or failure of such systems can be evaluated. A distinction is then drawn between the “mental-representational” and the “social” failure of religious systems. The contributions of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) are examined to explain the differential success of religious systems over time, such that some come to fail while others succeed. Then the relevance of CSR for explaining how and where religious systems lose influence altogether and various forms of nonreligion emerge, a process that has traditionally been called “secularization,” is outlined. The chapter closes with a case study outlining the applicability of the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to the decline of Catholic belief, practice, and identification, as well as the rise in anti–Catholic Church social action, in early twenty-first-century Ireland.
CSR and Religious Belief: Epistemic Friends or Foes?
Authors: Van Eyghen Hans 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter critically discusses three epistemic arguments that draw on CSR theories. Although all arguments vary considerably, they all refer to CSR theories in at least one of their premises. A first argument argues that religious belief is epistemically tainted because of the evolutionary history of the mechanisms that produce it. A second argument argues that the mechanisms that produce religious belief do not accurately grasp truths about the world. A third argument argues that religious belief merits a positive epistemic status because it is the natural result of our proper cognitive function. The chapter argues that all three arguments either fail or do not allow strong conclusions about the rationality of religious belief.
Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Science of Religion
Authors: Visala Aku 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
The cognitive science of religion is not a single theory but a loosely related family of approaches. As such, it does not have a clearly outlined “philosophical foundation” and does not necessarily require one. Nevertheless, recurring themes that could be labeled philosophical or methodological are often discussed in the literature. The aim of the chapter is to identify and analyze the recurring themes over which there is a significant consensus in the field. What distinguishes CSR from traditional interpretative and sociological approaches is its insistence on seeking explanations of religion from the science of human cognition. Some features of religion can be explained by invoking the workings of individual cognitive systems. The chapter will also discuss how CSR understands reduction, pluralism, and interdisciplinary relationships. Finally, it will highlight a recent development in that could be helpful for CSR: the new mechanistic philosophy of science.
Ghostly Relationships
Authors: Barrett Justin L. 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
Over time, more psychologists have become contributors to the cognitive science of religion (CSR), but when are they doing CSR and when are they doing psychology of religion? Does it matter? This chapter sketches contemporary scientific reflections on notions of death and the afterlife to illustrate the subtle differences between CSR and the psychology of religion. The two kindred scientific approaches overlap considerably, but giving attention to their central differences will assist scholars in finding complementarity, thereby improving both schools of inquiry and their contributions to each other. After developing this thesis, the chapter describes the organization and flow of The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science of Religion as a whole. It begins with general theoretical and methodological foundations, and then considers specific applications of CSR to substantive topics, such as beliefs in gods, sacred texts, sacred objects, and ritualized behaviors, before turning to how these domains of cultural expression are sometimes joined (or not) into religious systems. The handbook ends with comparisons between CSR and two other neighboring approaches (evolutionary studies of religion and neuroscience of religion) and, finally, considers the implications of CSR for philosophy of religion, religious education, and theology.
Gods: Cognition, Culture, and Ecology
Authors: Purzycki Benjamin Grant 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
All populations on the planet have some belief in spiritual agents. From the perspective of the cognitive sciences of religion, gods are cultural representations (i.e., shared, socially transmitted data) that are made possible, informed, and constrained by noncultural cognitive systems. In keeping with this view, this chapter first assesses the relationship between statistically universal aspects of gods and these aspects’ corollary cognitive systems. It then addresses how environmental inputs also contribute to our conceptions of deities and points to ways in which the cognitive science of religion (CSR) can contribute to a more ecologically minded approach to understanding religious systems.
Explaining and Solving Practical Problems Supernaturally
Authors: Watson-Jones Rachel E. , Legare Cristine H. 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
Why are we motivated to explain events and treat problems by appealing to supernatural agents or powers? We propose that supernatural beliefs and behaviors make the world seem more meaningful, understandable, and predictable. People use supernatural explanations to understand and interpret the events in their lives. They engage in supernatural behaviors such as rituals to assert control, solve problems, and ward off future adverse events. We describe the psychology underlying supernatural beliefs and behaviors and review evidence that they increase perceptions of control, reduce anxiety, and promote well-being.
Mortuary Practices
Authors: White Claire 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
Rituals surrounding the treatment and disposal of fellow humans are recurrent features of human culture. Many practices are time-consuming, expensive, elaborate, and even dangerous. Why then do people perform mortuary rituals? Anthropological and sociological researchers have long asserted that mortuary rituals confer tangible benefits to the social group. Importantly, these benefits exceed their costs, which helps to explain why people engage in such practices. Recent research from a variety of evolutionary and cognitive sciences provides fresh insight into the functions of mortuary practices. This chapter draws upon systematic cross-cultural comparisons to demonstrate that mortuary practices share core features that are not amenable to parochial explanations. Mortuary rituals are highly regulated, functionally opaque, and elaborate sets of behaviors that result in close and prolonged contact with the deceased and the social group. Based on research findings from adjacent social science disciplines, the chapter proposes that mortuary rituals aid in solving adaptive problems following the death of a group member.
Rank-Discounting as a Resolution to a Dilemma in Population Ethics
Authors: Asheim Geir B. , Zuber Stéphane 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
When evaluating well‐being streams in an anonymous manner, one faces a dilemma between, on the one hand, assigning dictatorship to a single worst‐off individual and thus succumbing to a tyranny of non‐aggregation and, on the other hand, assigning dictatorship to (unboundedly) many better‐off individuals and thus succumbing to a tyranny of aggregation. This can be shown to correspond to a population‐ethical dilemma in the variable population setting between, on the one hand, a reverse repugnant conclusion by preferring a very small population with high well‐being and, on the other hand, a repugnant or very sadistic conclusion. The repugnant conclusion is to prefer a sufficiently large population with lives barely worth living to a population with good lives. The very sadistic conclusion is not to prefer a sufficiently large population with lives worth living to a population with terrible lives. The dilemma can be resolved by relaxing replication invariance and thus allowing that evaluation in the fixed population setting might change with population size even though the relative distribution of well‐being over individuals remains unchanged. Rank‐dependent criteria, for example the rank‐discounted critical‐level generalized utilitarian (RDCLU) social welfare order, are evaluation criteria that resolve this dilemma but fail replication invariance. In this chapter, we recall the normative basis for the RDCLU social welfare order and provide conditions under which rank‐dependent criteria are the only way out of the dilemma. Furthermore, we discuss properties of such criteria, including the following interesting perspective of the relaxation of replication‐invariance: it becomes important to associate with the notion of total population not the people that are alive at any one time, but the people that will ever live. This perspective might have important implications for the conclusions that follow from population ethics.
Getting Personal
Authors: Rabinowicz Wlodek 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
According to the Intuition of Neutrality, there is a range of well-being levels such that adding people with lives at these levels doesn’t make the world either better or worse. As lives in the neutral range can be good for those who live them, this intuition is in conflict with one of the main tenets of welfarism; it creates a disparity between what is good for a person and what is impersonally good. Adding a person with a good life needn’t make the world better. An earlier article, “Broome and the Intuition of Neutrality” (Rabinowicz 2009) suggested but did not elaborate a reinterpretation of the neutral range that would remove the problematic disparity. On this reinterpretation, a life at a level within the neutral range is not merely impersonally neutral; it is also neutral in its personal value: neither better nor worse for its owner than non-existence. Nevertheless, among such personally neutral lives, some might still be personally better or worse than others, provided that they are incommensurable in their personal value with non-existence. The present chapter explores some of the implications of this “personalization” of the Intuition of Neutrality. In particular, it discusses its worrisome implications for neutral-range utilitarianism.
Person-Affecting Utilitarianism
Authors: Bader Ralf M. 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter is concerned with person-affecting views in population ethics which require the betterness ordering of populations to consist in betterness facts for the members of the populations and thereby require the evaluation of distributions to be reducible to facts about personal good. The first part argues that impersonal versions of utilitarianism involve an objectionable axiology precisely because they are incompatible with a person-affecting view. In particular, the problem is that they do not take personal good seriously, since they do not attribute ethical significance to it, but instead (at best) only consider it to be ethically relevant. As a result, they end up subordinating and sacrificing personal good for the sake of impersonal good and thereby treat persons as mere containers of impersonal good, which gives rise to particularly troubling implications in the case of variable-population comparisons. The second part evaluates the prospects for person-affecting versions of utilitarianism. It will be argued that person-affecting total utilitarianism presupposes comparativism, that is, that existence and non-existence are comparable in terms of personal good, and as such involves various problematic metaphysical commitments. Accordingly, same-number person-affecting utilitarianism turns out to be the only version of utilitarianism that neither has objectionable axiological implications nor requires problematic metaphysical commitments.
Gender, Ideology, and Nationalism in Chinese Children’s Cinema
Authors: Huang Yuhan 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter discusses the representation of gender, ideology, and nation in children’s films and films about children in mainland China. By observing thematic and narrative connections between films from different historical periods, it identifies three recurring cultural archetypes, which have numerous variations: the orphan, the revolutionary child-hero, and the anti-hero, analysing the construction and deconstruction of notable archetypes of children characters in their political and historical context, and showing how discourses of nationalism and socialism are established. Additionally, the chapter observes how girl protagonists fall in and out of popularity in Chinese children’s cinema, making visible an underlying power relationship that always subsumes women’s liberation and advancement under the national discourse. By examining the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and social class in these cinematic archetypes, the chapter traces a complicated process of cultural imagination of children and childhood.
Migrant Children and the “Space between” in the Films of Angelopoulos
Authors: Hemelryk Donald Stephanie 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
Childhood is a category of difference within sameness, a form of being that is intrinsic to all human life, and yet is simultaneously unavailable to adult humans. In the context of global migrations, childhood occupies an even more ethereal space of belonging and exclusion. This chapter advances Donald’s earlier work on Angelopoulos and the example of many other scholars working on the great auteur. His death in 2011 notwithstanding, Angelopoulos’ work still resonates with ongoing twenty-first-century historical conditions; the chapter explores that resonance, particularly in relation to his achievements representing the experience of migration and childhood. The child migrant’s journey through actual and imaginary borders—of innocence and knowledge, security, and alienation—epitomizes the transience of childhood itself, within which there must always be accumulation of understanding and preparation for survival among adults. The chapter argues that through Angelopoulos’ use of what French cinematography terms l’intervalle, or “space between,” he visualizes both the negative impact of migration on the collective (generally, the family) and, simultaneously, the ways in which children attempt to reformulate mores of belonging to contingent units of identity and emotional comfort.
How Children Learn to “Read” Movies
Authors: Bazalgette Cary 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter argues that children’s very early engagements with these media need to be recognized as vital learning processes that play a significant role in their developing cultural and social lives. From the 1980s onwards, the opportunities for this learning have been transformed by the advent of video and later technologies. Evidence from research, as well as from a range of scholars of early years, neuroscience, and film theory is deployed in reframing the stereotypical image of a child passively watching and rewatching films on TV, DVD, and online: presenting instead an account of intense, self-directed learning. Focusing in particular on two-year-olds, this chapter demonstrates that even at this age, it is possible to infer their learning from their emotional and physical responses to films and from their choices about what and how to watch.
Disney’s Musical Landscapes
Authors: Batchelder Daniel 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter traces the early aesthetic development of music-image relationships in the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio. While practical concerns largely informed Disney’s initial approaches to integrating sound and animation, the resulting cartoons yielded unique artistic effects. In these films, the constant coordination of images and sounds appears to be organized according to principles of music, including meter, form, and phrasing. Disney creatively mobilized these unique diegetic spaces in its first sound productions. Beginning with the parallel Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony series of short-subject cartoons and eventually culminating in feature-length productions such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi, Disney’s so-called Golden Age productions collectively signalled the emergence of a new mode of presentation: the animated musical.
Introduction: Coming to Terms with Children’s Film
Authors: Brown Noel 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This introductory chapter begins by establishing the overarching objectives of the handbook. It goes on to explore the thorny question of how children’s film may be conceptualized, outlining a number of possible critical approaches to the topic, and arguing in favour of understanding children’s films both in terms of their shared textual features and the contextual processes through which they are marketed, disseminated, and received by audiences. The chapter then presents a very brief historical overview of international children’s cinema to set the scene for the subsequent chapters in the volume. It concludes with an outline of the book’s structure and methodological approach, synopses of each chapter, and a consideration of the volume’s position in the developing field of scholarship on children’s film.
Danny Kaye as Children’s Film Star
Authors: Babington Bruce 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
One of the major “comedian comics” of the 1940s and 1950s, Danny Kaye is indelibly associated with children, through both his role as a UNICEF Special Ambassador (1954–1987) for Children and the child-friendly comedy of his films. This chapter begins by surveying aspects of that comedy, Kaye’s comic persona, and its appeal to children, with emphasis on his secondary career as a recording artist (which from the early 1950s was particularly aimed at child audiences). Though in some ways an untypical Kaye film, Hans Christian Andersen (dir. Charles Vidor, prod. Samuel Goldwyn, 1952), is central to Kaye’s career and charisma, especially in his scenes with children, who were seen as the original audience for Andersen’s stories. The chapter concludes with an in-depth discussion of the film as both a children’s narrative built around the storyteller’s relationship with children and a parallel adult melodrama centred on the hero’s impossible passion for the ballerina Doro.
Children’s Film and the Problematic “Happy Ending”
Authors: Brown Noel 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
In the popular consciousness, children’s films and happy endings are regarded as virtually synonymous. With close analysis of a wide range of international films, this chapter explores the theoretical underpinnings of the happy ending and argues in favour of greater ambiguity in the genre of children’s cinema than the term implies. It begins by examining the narrational properties of the happy ending and how narrative style in children’s cinema is constructed to incorporate happy endings. It then discusses how the concept applies to a number of children’s films across a broad historical period, from the “utopian” endings of films such as The Wizard of Oz to more ambivalent productions from countries such as the United States, Britain, Australia, and Kenya.
“Gazanevshchina”
Authors: Smola Klavdia 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter is dedicated to one of the most peculiar phenomena of the Leningrad underground: “Gazanevshchina,” or “Gaza-Nevskii culture,” which was triggered by two officially approved exhibitions in 1974–1975. Contrary to the expectations of the authorities, the exhibitions attracted broad public interest. Although the Gazanevshchina movement declined shortly after the two events, it brought about a meaningful moment of public recognition of the unofficial art against the backdrop of the system’s violence. This chapter explores the political and cultural context in which the Gaza-Nevskii movement came to life, as well as its influence on the subsequent development of the late Soviet underground. It also shows how a long period of apartment exhibitions and occasional vernissages in cultural centers and research institutes paved the way for the breakthrough of Gazanevshchina.
Superdiversity through the Lens of Brexit
Authors: Neal Sarah , Cochrane Allan 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
In the context of a turn to defensive nationalism in a number of countries, this chapter examines the ways in which superdiversity can be understood in relation to the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum vote on its membership in the European Union (EU). The outcome of the referendum was a decision to leave the EU (generally labeled “Brexit”), a political event that has been widely interpreted as an articulation of English nationalism. It has driven a particularly intense period of social and cultural polarization of the United Kingdom, sharpening divisions, racialization processes, and antimigrant hostilities. While there has been much attention and focus on understanding why the Leave EU campaign was successful, less attention has been paid to interrogating the Remain vote. The political geographies of Remain often overlapped with geographies of superdiversity, and London in particular, and other more ethnically diverse areas, tended to vote for the United Kingdom to stay in the EU. Taking this relationship as a starting point, the chapter confirms the extent to which the Brexit project, as a form of defensive English nationalism, is unsettled and challenged by the lived experience of superdiversity, which suggests the prospect of a counternarrative that highlights the possibility of a politics of hope.
Superdiversity in Highly Regulated Global Cities
Authors: Kathiravelu Laavanya 
Published: April 2022

Abstract
This chapter examines the analytical productivity of superdiversity as a perspective in conversation with issues of nationalism, citizenship, and immigration from an empirical perspective that draws primarily from studies of (im)migration in highly globalized city-states with intensely regulated migration regimes. In relation to concepts of “intersectionality” and immigrant integration, it asks how superdiversity helps to interrogate key empirical and political questions of migration-led stratification and boundary-making. In doing so, the chapter suggests that superdiversity as a frame prompts scholars to be better primed to uncover complex intersections of difference that cannot be encompassed by traditional binaries of Black–White, citizen–foreigner, or majority–minority. This chapter shows how the superdiversity lens disrupts assumptions made by a Eurocentric migration paradigm that is less suited for understanding empirical social realities in contexts in contemporary Asia. However, the chapter follows others in highlighting that a superdiversity framework is less useful in speaking to issues of domination and entrenched structural racism.