Full Description
This book offers a political anthropological perspective on the problematic character of science, combining insights from historical sociology, political theory, and cultural anthropology. Its central idea, departing from the works of Frances Yates and the Gnosticism thesis of Eric Voegelin, is that far from being the radical opposite of magic, modern science effectively grew out of magic, and its varieties, like alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, the occult, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism. Showing that the desire to use science to solve various - real or presumed - problems of human existence has created a permanent liminal crisis, it contends that the 'will to science' is parasitic, existing as it does in sheer relationality, outside of and in between concrete places and communities. A study of the mutual relationship between magic and science in different historical eras, ranging from the Early Neolithic to recent disease prevention ideas, Magic and the Will to Science will appeal to scholars and students of social and anthropological theory, and the philosophy and sociology of science.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Ch1 Magical doubles as liminal technicity
Ch2 Sensuals without borders: artificial man, artificial intelligence
Ch3. The cunning of unreason: exposure to harm to transpose into a new status
Ch4. Recursive algorithm in the amplification of magic
Ch5. The unknown factor of effusion in spiritualised science
Ch6. Mind control
Ch7. One tower: when the dead seized the living
Conclusion
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index
