Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Print version record.

Hermeneutics and the philosophical future of religious studies -- The present contenders: the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion -- The hermeneutics of contemplation -- Beyond interpretation to contemplation -- Beyond frameworks and grids to concept-formation -- Suspicion about suspicion -- The hermeneutics of contemplation and Wittgensteinian Fideism -- Bernard Williams on the gods and us -- Hermeneutics and modernity -- Assumptions about the gods -- Questioning the assumptions -- Hume's legacy -- Hume and hermeneutics -- Hume's first level of criticism -- Hume's second level of criticism -- Hume's third level of criticism -- Hume's 'true religion' -- Hume on miracles -- Beyond design to a song of creation -- Hume's one-sided diet -- Hume and us -- Feuerbach: religion's secret? -- Feuerbach and demystification -- God among the predicates -- God and the human species -- Contradiction and contemplation -- Death and finitude -- Contemplating reactions to death -- God and death -- Conclusions about death -- Marx and Engels: religion, alienation and compensation -- Marxism and monism -- Religion and ideology -- Tylor and Frazer: are religious beliefs mistaken hypotheses? -- Animism and intellectualism -- Animism, souls and spirits -- What rituals can be -- Rituals and the mythology in our language -- Rituals and explanations -- Marett: primitive reactions -- Marett and anti-intellectualism -- Marett and suspicion -- In the beginning was the dance -- Marett's other course.

Leading philosopher of religion D.Z. Phillips examines the conceptual assumptions of atheistic thought in the work of leading thinkers including Frazer, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud and Durkheim. Extending Phillips' earlier work, Religion Without Explanation, this book makes an important new contribution to the philosophy of religion and related disciplines.

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