Religious Belief and Embodied Action

In Belief and Cult (Princeton UP, 2002), Jacob Mackey provides a wide-ranging, interdisciplinarily grounded defense of the category of belief in general and a robust representational and intentional version of the notion in particular. In my contribution to this panel, I examine Mackey’s treatment of the notion of belief, primarily in Part I of the book, mainly as it engages in contemporary debates and live issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neurosciences. In particular, I examine the import of theories of belief coming from contemporary philosophy of mind that seek to downplay belief’s more strictly representational aspects and ground it more directly in action, habit, and experience, perhaps the dissolving the very foundational dichotomy between “belief” and “practice/ritual” that has come to organize the study of Roman religion and its presumed contrast with Christianity as Mackey tells it.