Max Weber famously characterized the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization that separates the natural world from the divine (by excluding magic and value from the realm of science, and reason and fact from the realm of religion) as the ’disenchantment of the world.’ Egil Asprem argues for a conceptual shift in how we view this key narrative of modernity. Instead of a sociohistorical process of disenchantment that produces increasingly rational minds, Asprem maintains that the continued presence of ’magic’ and ’enchantment’ in people’s everyday experience of the world created an intellectual
problem for those few who were socialized to believe that nature should contain no such incalculable mysteries. Drawing on a wide range of early twentieth-century primary sources from theoretical physics, occultism, embryology, radioactivity, psychical research, and other fields, Asprem casts the intellectual life of high modernity as a synchronic struggle across conspicuously different fields that shared surprisingly similar intellectual problems about value, meaning, and the limits of knowledge.
Innehållsförteckning
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction the Limits of Reason
Part 1.
From Process to Problem
1. From Process to Problem
2. Science as Worldview
Part 2.
New Natural Theologies
3. Brave New World: An Introduction to Part Two
4. Physical Science in a Modern Mode
5. The Meaning of Life: Mechanism and Purpose in the Sciences of Life and Mind
6. Five Schools of Natural Theology: Reconciling Science and Religion
Part 3.
Laboratories of Enchantment
7. Against Agnosticism: Psychical Research and the Naturalisation of the Supernatural
8. Laboratories of Enchantment: Parapsychology in Search of a Paradigm
9. Professionals Out of the Ordinary: How Parapsychology Became a University Discipline
Part 4.
Esoteric Epistemologies
10. Esoteric Epistemologies
11. The Problems of a Gnostic Science: The Case of Theosophy’s Occult Chemistry
12. Perceiving Higher Worlds: Two Perspectives
Conclusion Implications for the Study of Science, Religion, and Esotericism
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Om författaren
Egil Asprem is Associate Professor of History of Religions at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions, and Gender Studies, Stockholm University, and the author of
Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture, also published by SUNY Press.
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