Since September 2008 I have been engaged in a PhD project that examines interconnections, dialogues, and polemical exchanges between esoteric and scientific spokespersons in (primarily the first half of) the 20th century. The project title is “Esotericism and Scientific Naturalism in the 20th Century: Dialogue and Polemics”, and is funded by the Top Talent grant of the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). It is carried out in the institutional setting of the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, a “chair group” (leerstoelgroep) of Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
The project seeks to analyse the complex interfaces between esoteric and scientific discourse in the late modern period – a period where such interfaces have largely been neglected by academic studies. One the one hand, the research aims to localise sites of dialogue where esoteric ideas have informed nascent scientific research programs (e.g. psychical research, parapsychlogy, vitalism within biology, and some episodes on the fringes of theoretical ether physics), and scientific ideas have been appropriated by esoteric spokespersons (as a “positive scientism”, “rhetoric of rationality” or otherwise genuine attempts to bring science and esotericism together). Parallel to episodes of dialogue the research also traces an unfolding polemical discourse, in which professional scientists and philosophers define and defend the borders of science against “superstition” and “pseudosciences”, while esotericists demonise science as “materialistic”, “reductionistic”, “mechanistic”, and/or “dogmatic”. I see the polemical clashes in what has been called the “paraculture”, between “scientific skeptics” and proponents of various types of “New Age science” and paranormal beliefs, as the culmination of this process.
The project is of a strongly interdisciplinary character, and draws on approaches from the intellectual history, history and philosophy of science, sociology, and religious studies, in addition to recent esotericism research.
