Captive Gods by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Captive Gods by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how early social scientists developed our modern understandings of society through their theories of religion

The foundations of modern social science were built on the study of religion, the acclaimed thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah argues. Delving into the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he investigates how formative thinkers—notably Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—grappled with the concepts of society and religion as interdependent categories. Appiah shows how their efforts to define religion, or evade the task, mark the power and limitations of social thought in ways that persist among theorists today. Religion was not merely an object of study but a framework through which early social scientists established sociology as a discipline.

Appiah also examines more recent work in both interpretive sociology and evolutionary and cognitive psychology about the mechanisms through which communities form beliefs and values—while underscoring the enduring significance of these earlier debates for contemporary social thought. Throughout, he intertwines storytelling, historical analysis, and philosophical reflection to show how our ideas about society and culture have been, and continue to be, forged in dialogue with religious questions.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. His books include The Ethics of Identity, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, and As If: Idealization and Ideals. He writes the weekly “Ethicist” column for the New York Times Magazine.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780300233063
ISBN 10	030023306X
Title	Captive Gods
Author	Kwame Anthony Appiah
Series	The Terry Lectures
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Yale University Press
Year published	2025-10-07
Number of pages	328
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.