Download or read book Magic Science and Society written by Alex Dennis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic, Science and Society investigates the way the ‘rationality debate’ has developed over the last century, from E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s study of Azande magic, through Peter Winch’s argument that there can be no such thing as a social science, across the arguments about the proper status of science in the 1970s and 1980s, to the ‘epistemological’ and ‘ontological’ turns of the early twenty-first century. Different people have different understandings of what is rational: some practise magic, some orientate to legal convention and tradition and others defer to science and logic. Starting with anthropological studies of witchcraft, and working through to contemporary debates about epistemology and ontology in social science, this book systematically examines the ways key questions about these issues have been framed and answered. These include: Can ‘magic’ be real, either for members of the cultures that practise it or more generally? How can we arbitrate between different types of rationality? Is science a benchmark for studying other forms of rationality or just a cultural practice like any other? What are the implications of these issues for the social sciences themselves? This book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers of the social sciences and science studies practitioners.
Download or read book Magic Science and Religion and Other Essays written by Bronislaw Malinowski and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vintage book comprises three famous Malinowski essays on the subject of religion. Malinowski is one of the most important and influential anthropologists of all time. He is particularly renowned for his ability to combine the reality of human experience, with the cold calculations of science. An important collection of three of his most famous essays, "Magic, Science and Religion" provides its reader with a series of concepts concerning religion, magic, science, rite and myth. This is undertaken in an attempt to form a definite impression and understanding of the Trobrianders of New Guinea. The chapters of this book include: "Magic, Science and Religion", "Primitive Man and his Religion", "Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings", "Faith and Cult", "The Creative Acts of Religion", "Providence in Primitive Life", "Man's Selective Interest in Nature", etcetera. This book is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
Download or read book Science and Magic in the Modern World written by Eugene V. Subbotsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and Magic in the Modern World is a unique text that explores the role of magical thinking in everyday life. It provides an excellent psychological look at the subconscious belief in magic in both popular culture and society, as well as experimental research that considers human consciousness as a derivative of belief in the supernatural, thus showing that our feelings, emotions, attitudes and other psychological processes follow the laws of magic. This book synthesises the science of ‘natural’ phenomena and the magic of the ‘supernatural’ to present an interesting look at the juxtaposition of the inner and outer selves. Fusing research into psychological disorders, subconscious feelings, as well as the rising presence of artificial intelligence, this book demonstrates how an engagement with magical thinking can enhance one’s creativity and cognitive skills. Science and Magic in the Modern World is an invaluable resource for those studying consciousness, as well as those looking at the effect of magical thinking on religion, politics, science and society.
Download or read book Religion Science and Magic In Concert and in Conflict written by Jacob Neusner Professor of Religion University of South Florida and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989-06-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every culture makes the distinction between "true religion" and magic, regarding one action and its result as "miraculous," while rejecting another as the work of the devil. Surveying such topics as Babylonian witchcraft, Jesus the magician, magic in Hasidism and Kabbalah, and magic in Anglo-Saxon England, these ten essays provide a rigrous examination of the history of this distinction in Christianity and Judaism. Written by such distinguished scholars as Jacob Neusner, Hans Penner, Howard Kee, Tzvi Abusch, Susan R. Garrett, and Moshe Idel, the essays explore a broad range of topics, including how certain social groups sort out approved practices and beliefs from those that are disapproved--providing fresh insight into how groups define themselves; "magic" as an insider's term for the outsider's religion; and the tendency of religious traditions to exclude the magical. In addition the collection provides illuminating social, cultural, and anthropological explanations for the prominence of the magical in certain periods and literature.
Download or read book Magic Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality written by Stanley J. Tambiah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-03-22 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible and illuminating book explores the classical opposition between magic, science and religion.
Download or read book Beyond Imported Magic written by Eden Medina and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies challenging the idea that technology and science flow only from global North to South. The essays in this volume study the creation, adaptation, and use of science and technology in Latin America. They challenge the view that scientific ideas and technology travel unchanged from the global North to the global South—the view of technology as “imported magic.” They describe not only alternate pathways for innovation, invention, and discovery but also how ideas and technologies circulate in Latin American contexts and transnationally. The contributors' explorations of these issues, and their examination of specific Latin American experiences with science and technology, offer a broader, more nuanced understanding of how science, technology, politics, and power interact in the past and present. The essays in this book use methods from history and the social sciences to investigate forms of local creation and use of technologies; the circulation of ideas, people, and artifacts in local and global networks; and hybrid technologies and forms of knowledge production. They address such topics as the work of female forensic geneticists in Colombia; the pioneering Argentinean use of fingerprinting technology in the late nineteenth century; the design, use, and meaning of the XO Laptops created and distributed by the One Laptop per Child Program; and the development of nuclear energy in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. Contributors Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Morgan G. Ames, Javiera Barandiarán, João Biehl, Anita Say Chan, Amy Cox Hall, Henrique Cukierman, Ana Delgado, Rafael Dias, Adriana Díaz del Castillo H., Mariano Fressoli, Jonathan Hagood, Christina Holmes, Matthieu Hubert, Noela Invernizzi, Michael Lemon, Ivan da Costa Marques, Gisela Mateos, Eden Medina, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, Hugo Palmarola, Tania Pérez-Bustos, Julia Rodriguez, Israel Rodríguez-Giralt, Edna Suárez Díaz, Hernán Thomas, Manuel Tironi, Dominique Vinck
Download or read book Making Magic written by Randall Styers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.
Download or read book Magic in the Modern World written by Edward Bever and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays considers the place of magic in the modern world, first by exploring the ways in which modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and then by illuminating how modern proponents of magic have worked to legitimize their practices through an overt embrace of evolving forms such as esotericism and supernaturalism. Taking a two-track approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of the construction of the modern self and its relation to the modern preoccupation with magic. Essays examine how modern “rational” consciousness is generated and maintained and how proponents of both magical and scientific traditions rationalize evidence to fit accepted orthodoxy. This book also describes how people unsatisfied with the norms of modern subjectivity embrace various forms of magic—and the methods these modern practitioners use to legitimate magic in the modern world. A compelling assessment of magic from the early modern period to today, Magic in the Modern World shows how, despite the dominant culture’s emphatic denial of their validity, older forms of magic persist and develop while new forms of magic continue to emerge. In addition to the editors, contributors include Egil Asprem, Erik Davis, Megan Goodwin, Dan Harms, Adam Jortner, and Benedek Láng.
Download or read book Myth in Primitive Psychology written by Bronislaw Malinowski and published by New York : W.W. Norton. This book was released on 1926 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Magic Science and Religion written by Bronislaw Malinowski and published by . This book was released on 2015-02-16 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2015 Reprint of 1954 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In his handling of science, magic, and religion, Malinowski essentially accepted the traditional Western conception of a dual reality-the reality of the natural world, grounded in observation and rational procedures that lead to mastery, and supernatural reality, grounded in emotional needs that give rise to faith. Unlike Frazer, for example, Malinowski derived science not from magic but from man's capacity to organize knowledge, as demonstrated by Trobriand technical skills in gardening, shipbuilding, etc. In contrast, he treated magic, which coexisted with these skills, as an organized response to a sense of limitation and impotence in the face of danger, difficulty, and frustration. Again, he differentiated between magic and religion in defining magical systems as essentially pragmatic in their aims and religious systems as self-fulfilling rituals organized, for example, around life crises.
Download or read book Magic Science Religion written by Ira Livingston and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic Science Religion explores surprising intersections among the three meaning-making and world-making practices named in the title. Through colorful examples, the book reveals circuitous ways that social, cultural and natural systems connect, enabling real kinds of magic to operate. Among the many case studies are accounts of how an eighteenth-century actor gave his audience goosebumps; how painters, poets, and pool sharks use nonlinearity in working their magics; how the first vertebrates gained consciousness; how plants fine-tuned human color vision; and the necessarily magical element of activism that builds on the conviction that "another future is possible" while working to push self-fulfilling prophecy into political action.
Download or read book A History of Magic and Experimental Science written by Lynn Thorndike and published by . This book was released on 1934 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A History of Science Magic and Belief written by Steven P. Marrone and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Science, Magic and Belief is an exploration of the origins of modern society through the culture of the middle ages and early modern period. By examining the intertwined paths of three different systems for interpreting the world, it seeks to create a narrative which culminates in the birth of modernity. It looks at the tensions and boundaries between science and magic throughout the middle ages and how they were affected by elite efforts to rationalise society, often through religion. The witch-crazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth century are seen as a pivotal point, and the emergence from these into social peace is deemed possible due to the Scientific Revolution and the politics of the early modern state. This book is unique in drawing together the histories of science, magic and religion. It is thus an ideal book for those studying any or all of these topics, and with its broad time frame, it is also suitable for students of the history of Europe or Western civilisation in general.
Download or read book Magic Science and Religion in Early Modern Europe written by Mark A. Waddell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible new exploration of the vibrant world of early modern Europe through a focus on magic, science, and religion.
Download or read book The Search for the Absolute written by Jeffrey H. Williams and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and archaeology tell us that when our far ancestors began to settle in localized groups, they codified their lives and experiences, and formed a collective for mutual support. This proto-civilization would have arisen from each individual’s questions about the world, and their attempt to understand themselves and their place in the world. These groups, or tribes, evolved rules of conduct to facilitate communal living, and made a calendar for the group’s celebration of harvests, and other events upon which the group was utterly dependent. This process of social evolution is the origin of religion, and of a magical way of looking at Nature. Eventually, this developing worldview was also the origin of science, which is our investigation of Nature to understand something of what is happening around us, and to use this knowledge to ensure our survival in a violent, indifferent Universe. After all, science and religion seek to answer the same question: Why and how is the natural world the way it is? This book seeks to show how science evolved from religion and magic, in response to a need to understand Nature.
Download or read book Religion and the Decline of Magic written by Keith Thomas and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-01-30 with total page 931 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700, when science and rationalism began to challenge the older systems of belief.
Download or read book The Myth of Disenchantment written by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
