EXPLAIN AND UNDERSTAND: THE QUARREL AROUND THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROCEDURE PROPER TO THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES

• Autor(a) principal: Campos, Fabiano Victor
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Interações (Uberlândia. Online)
• Texto Completo: http://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/interacoes/article/view/18193
• topic: Explain; Understand; Epistemology; Religious Studies; Paul Ricoeur; explicar; compreender; epistemologia; Ciência da Religião; Paul Ricoeur

This article aims to address the dichotomous polarity between explanation and understanding as a problem underlying the epistemological reflections that pervade Religious Studies. Analyzing the historical origins of the debate between explanation and understanding as the respective epistemological procedures proper to the Sciences of Nature and Human Sciences, the author tries to show how Religious Studies often stood in the face of this epistemological quarrel, as well as the consequences of its option to this problem, with regard to the results of their own research and their own self-understanding as an area of knowledge. He understands that the preoccupations of its epistemological character, by cientists of religion, that is, their metatheoretical efforts to make Religious Studies increasingly consolidate their scientific reputation, impose the necessity of not avoiding the task of confronting this problematic. For this reason, it presents, finally, the contributions of Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology to resolve the dichotomous polarity between explanation and understanding inside the Religious Studies.