Positioning the Scholar

Indrek Peedu is a Lecturer of Religious Studies at the University of Tartu. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Tartu in 2019 for a thesis that received the 2020 ESSSAT Research Prize. He has previously also worked as an Associated Researcher at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. He is the current President of the Estonian Society for the Study of Religions. His main areas of research are method and theory in the study of religion, history of the study of religion, evolutionary and cognitive sciences of religion and the intellectual history of social, cultural and religious evolutionism. His previous publications include the edited volume Estonian Study of Religion: A Reader (University of Tartu Press, 2019) as well as numerous articles in many academic journals.

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Scientific Explanation of Religiosity: a Research Programme and a Goal.- Chapter 3. Method(ology) in the Study of Religion.- Chapter 4. The Problem of Epistemological Presuppositions and Inferences in the Cognitive and Evolutionary Approaches.- Chapter 5. Evolution, Epistemology and Religiosity.- Chapter 6. The Underdetermination of Scientific Research and the Evolutionary Study of Religion.- Chapter 7. The Study of Religion and the Search for Epistemological and Methodological Unity.- Chapter 8. The Study of Religion and the Position(s) of the Scholar.