Lucien Lévy-Brühl was a French philosopher who taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1899 to 1927. Investigating the psychology of ‘primitive’ societies, his book Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés primitives (1910) made a distinguished contribution to the study of archaic religion and mythology, shaping the budding discipline of anthropology. Lévy-Brühl’s interest in irrational as well as mystical forms of engagement with the world – thought to be characteristic of ‘primitive’ societies – inflected subsequent research towards a pluralistic and relativistic sociology.