Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science

The anthropologist Robin Horton is widely regarded as one of the most creative and critical thinkers of his generation. This collection of some of his classic papers on African religion, written between l960 and l990 is also a wide-ranging inquiry into religious thought, particularly its relationship to aesthetic and scientific thought. Horton criticizes recent orthodoxies in this area, and instead proposes an "Intellectualist" alternative that stresses similarities between the religious and the scientific.