Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Myth and Ideology: 2 (Lawrence Krader’s Legacy in Science, History and Philosophy)

This posthumously published work by Lawrence Krader surveys the study of myths from ancient times (classical Greece and Rome, Egypt, Babylonian, Akkadian, Sumerian, Chinese), from the Biblical traditions, from the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, and from Northeastern and Central Asia. The book covers the various approaches to the study of myth from ancient times through Europe in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, in the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century, among the evolutionists of the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and the structuralists, and hermeneutic approaches as well as linguistics. The book covers the treatment of myth from the inside, that is, from the experience of those committed to the myth and from the outside or those ethnologists, philosophers, and other students of myth who are outsiders. This treatment takes up the theme of esoteric and exoteric myths as it rejects some of the assumptions and approaches to the study of myth in the past while singling out others for approval and inclusion in the general theory of myth. Interestingly, it includes a discussion of myth in science and in infinitesimal mathematics. And, it considers the relationship between myth and ideology in the twentieth century in relation to politics and power. It both incorporates and broadens Krader’s theory of nature as a manifold consisting of different orders which he developed in his magnum opus Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing. About the Author Cyril Levitt (Ph.D., Freie Universität Berlin) is professor and past chair in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University in Canada. A fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he has been a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Sabine Sander (Ph.D., Leipzig University; Habilitation, University of Coblenz-Landau) is an academic research associate and former visiting professor at McMaster University. She is the author of Language as Bridge and Border (2017), Dialogische Verantwortung (2015), as well as numerous articles in journals and books.