ABSTRACT
Edward Evans-Pritchard is another scholar who, like Lucien Levy-Bruhl, worked a great deal on the origins of primitive religion. He was the author of Theories of Primitive Religion, in which he devoted an entire section to Levy-Bruhl, whom he compared to Pareto Vilfredo, when the latter was dealing with non-logical actions. The Dutch theologian and historian Gerardus van der Leeuw was influenced by E. Husserl and W. Dilthey, above all in his ideas on religion. He developed, however, a personal and autonomous scientific point of view. He appeared to be mainly concerned about what religion manifests of itself, religion conceived as a phenomenological occurrence, an object in relation to a subject that acknowledges it. Giovanni Filoramo formulated a good synthesis of the three phases of van der Leeuw's methodology: the lived experience, or Erlebnis, of the religious phenomenon taken into consideration; the understanding, or Verstehen, of the religious phenomenon; and the evidence, or Bezeugung.
