Who Believes in Belief? William Pooley (bio) modernity, belief, alief, doubt, Jason Josephson Storm, Michael Saler, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Nils Bubandt The "disenchantment of the world" remains a guiding metanarrative for many histories last four hundred years Europe. There are those who continue to argue what Keith Thomas called general "decline magic," even if they disagree about chronologies a...

The title of the newest and fourteenth book by science writer Philip Ball leaves no doubt: this is a counter-attack on claims made by Steven Pinker in his publications The Language Instinct (1994) and How the Mind Works (1997). Pinker characterized music as ‘auditory cheesecake’ (1997: 534): a tasty bonus but, from an evolutionary point of view, no more than a by-product of much more important ...