Lecturer, Ph.D. Matti Kamppinen
Matti Kamppinen, Dr. Phil., is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of Turku. He has studied ethnomedicine in the Peruvian Amazon and more recently the cultural models of risk and time. He has authored and edited several books: A Historical Introduction to Phenomenology (co-authored with Seppo Sajama, Croom Helm 1987), Consciousness, Cognitive Schemata, and Relativism (edited, Kluwer Academic 1993), and Consiousness in Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience (co-edited with Antti Revonsuo, Lawrence Erlbaum 1994) among others. Recently he has completed a series of four books (in Finnish) on the subject of cultural time constructions and edited a textbook on futures research.
Take look at his relevant publications in comparative religion or at the full list of publications in his cv in order to find out his research interests.
Currently he is heading two research projects funded by the Academy of Finland, CORECO and AMACULT.
My new book, titled Methodological Issues in Religious Studies: with Special Attention to Lauri Honko’s Theoretical Contribution (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012) has just come out. The book is a sequel to my Intentional Systems Theory as a Conceptual Framework for Religious Studies (The Edwin Mellen Press 2010), and it tackles the role of philosophy, concepts and theories in the empirical study of religion, as well as the challenges of religion education and of cultural relativism. Furthermore, the theoretical relevance of the work of Lauri Honko (1932-2002), the professor of folkloristics and comparative religion at Turku University, is assessed. Professor Donald Wiebe, University of Toronto, has written the preface of the book. For details, see the publisher’s homepage.
Intentional systems theory and the study of religion
Matti Kamppinen’s new book Intentional Systems Theory as a Conceptual Framework for Religious Studies – A Scientific Method for Studying Beliefs (The Edwin Mellen Press 2010) investigates the philosophical assumptions in religious studies, especially in ethnography of religion. The central claim is that like other fields of research in social sciences and humanities, religious studies treats its study object as an intentional system, that is, as a system that navigates on the basis of its beliefs and desires, and whose behaviour can be described, explained and predicted on the basis of its internal representations. Intentional systems theory provides the philosophical foundations for religious studies and the resources for critical assessment of religious belief and action.
Critical acclaim
“Matti Kamppinen’s new book is an insightful inquiry into fundamental issues in the study of religion and the philosophical grounds of such studies. (…) radical and controversial suggestions and arguments are central in Kamppinen’s project. He wants to challenge our understanding of the ways in which religious phenomena can and ought to be scientifically explored. As such a challenge, the book is an important contribution to the on-going critical debate over the methodology of religious studies (and, indirectly, to the larger debate over the methodology of the human sciences generally). The book is therefore to be recommended to a wide audience working in these fields, even if most scholars will undoubtedly be unwilling to follow its conclusions."
Sami Pihlström
Director, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland
Professor of Practical Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
“This book is a piece of philosophy of science with special regard to the ethnographic and scientific study and philosophy of religion. It is, however, more than that. It is also a convincing argument in favour of one basic scientific approach, the intentional systems approach, to religion, a scientific approach furthermore deeply embedded in and in line with folk psychology, common sense and with that 'hard core of rationality' that cuts across and gives us access to 'the other' and to other cultures. Last but not least, it links, as said, in a convincing way the descriptive, analytical approach with a normative stance, and it thus links a scientific description and explanation of religion with a normative critical evaluation of religion."
Professor Dr Tim Jensen
Department of the Study of Religions, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
Table of contents
Preface by Luther H. Martin
Introduction
1.Intentional systems theory and the empirical study of religion
Intentional systems and common sense
Intentional systems in the works of Durkheim, Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard
Amazonian folk religion
2. Theory of intentional systems
Systems thinking
Composition of intentional systems
Structure of intentional systems
Belief as a theoretical and functional entity
Religious intentional systems
3. Religious contents and their dynamics
Hallmark of religious contents
Gods in Flabbergast, a constructed religion
Cultural models as systems of contents
Dynamics of contents: tradition ecology
Tradition ecology and illness models
4. Rationality as systemic property
Rationality as a precondition of ethnographic descriptions
Rationality as an explanatory principle
Rationality and religious games
Rationality and critical study of religion
5. Navigating in the world of uncertainty
Possible worlds
Cultural models of time
Playing against yashingo
Playing against technological risks
Playing against market forces
Playing against superior beings in archaic and modern societies
Imposing the features of religions into other cultural systems
6. Concepts of boundary and sacred
Intentional systems and boundaries
Foundations and uses of boundaries
Sacred as a boundary that involves supernatural entities
7. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of names and subjects