Saša Horvat, "Contemporary Scientific Explanations of Religion"

Saša Horvat (University of Zagreb) delivers his talk 'Contemporary Scientific Explanations of Religion', at the HPP/Ian Ramsey Centre's 2018-2019 seminar series.

Abstract: The last few decades have been marked by numerous scientific studies and projects on human religiosity in the interdisciplinary area shared by neuroscience, cognitive science and evolutionary science. The question arises can empirical research contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of religiosity in the field of theology and philosophy? If the answer is negative, then we need to see what the problems are. If the answer is positive, then we need to see what the perspectives of joint research are. The lecture will briefly analyse the main hypotheses and methods of the above-mentioned sciences, after which we will try to understand whether these insights can be useful to theology and philosophy and what further development we can expect in the near future.

Saša Horvat successfully defended doctoral thesis 'Heidegger's Notion of Oblivion' in 2014. He was supervised by Josip Oslić at The Faculty of Philosophy of the Society of Jesus, in Zagreb. Now he is working as a docent, at Theology in Rijeka, Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb. He is the project leader of the institutional project “Philosophical and theological considerations of scientific understanding of the human being and religiosity" (2015-2020). He is also the principal investigator of the Project "Evolution, religion, cognitive science: problems and perspectives". He initiated and is the head of the organizing committee of the international interdisciplinary conference “Rijeka’s scientific bridges” in Rijeka, Croatia.