ABSTRACT
Perhaps one of the most famous uses of the term as a scholarly mode of analysis is Rene Descartes’ 1637 Discours de la Methode Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verite dans les sciences. More narrowly, both “method” and “methodology” have often been used in the academic study of religion, to name both the approach that one adopts in studying religion as well as the work of those who examine the tools and methods that bring the study of religion into existence in the first place. The former, however, seem only to possess what might be better characterized as a rough intuition about how that which they designate as religion somehow transcends or defies all attempts to study it as something thoroughly human and thus inherently historical, sociological etc.
