The Abyss of Intransitivity: On Critical Realism and Theories of Religion

From the mid-1970s onwards Hubert Seiwert published a series of pioneering works on the positioning of the study of religion/s (Religionswissenschaft) as an academic discipline. These were the days of the eclipse of the phenomenology of religion, when the need was felt to get more solid ground under one’s feet in order to rejuvenate the discipline. Seiwert positioned himself in the camp of those who sought their refuge in the philosophy of science, in particular Critical Rationalism. Throughout his career as one of Germany’s most prominent scholars of religion, Seiwert’s work was informed by some recurrent leitmotivs: the importance of the philosophy of science, the duality and combination of the historical and systematic dimensions of the study of religion, and the status of Religionswissenschaft as an empirical science. In a text from 2014, Seiwert claims that the empirical status of Religionswissenschaft opposes ‘big theories’ and he diagnoses an excess of theoretical selfreticence in the study of religion/s. Other disciplines, Seiwert thinks (and I concur), seem to be more at ease with theorizing about religion. Yet, it is doubtful whether it is the empirical character of our discipline that is the causal factor here: archaeology, anthropology and sociology, for example, are hardly less empirical, yet they are much more prone to theorizing. In addition, Seiwert finds that theory formation has a tendency to get detached from empirical materials and to develop