Wild Experiment Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin

Schaefer, Donovan O.

ISBN 10: 1478018259 / ISBN 13: 9781478018254

Published by Duke University Press, 2022

Word and number in pen on half-title page, otherwise text clean and tight; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 328 pages. Seller Inventory # 250177

Synopsis:

In Wild Experiment, Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer reconceptualizes rationality as defined by affective processes at every level. He introduces the model of “cogency theory” to reconsider the relationship between evolutionary biology and secularism, examining mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s. Along the way, Schaefer reappraises a range of related issues, from secular architecture at Oxford to American eugenics to contemporary climate denialism. These case studies locate the intersection of thinking and feeling in the way scientific rationality balances excited discovery with anxious scrutiny, in the fascination of conspiracy theories, and in how racist feelings assume the mantle of rational objectivity. The fact that cognition is felt, Schaefer demonstrates, is both why science succeeds and why it fails. He concludes that science, secularism, atheism, and reason itself are not separate from feeling but comprehensively defined by it.

About the Author: Donovan O. Schaefer is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power, also published by Duke University Press, and The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Wild Experiment Feeling Science and ...
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 2022
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good+