The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939 - Couverture souple

Asprem, Egil

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1438469926 ISBN 13 : 9781438469928

Editeur : State University of New York Press, 2018

Synopsis

Challenges the conventional view of a “disenchanted” and secular modernity, and recovers the complex relation that exists between science, religion, and esotericism in the modern world.

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.

“The Problem of Disenchantment is, in its entirety, extraordinarily well researched, argued, and written—representing at once the most complete and nuanced treatment of the notion of disenchantment within this network of scientific, religious, philosophical, and esoteric discourses and currents.” — Nova Religio

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: State University of New York Press
• Date d'édition: 2018
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1438469926
• ISBN 13: 9781438469928
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 660
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible