Paul Forman | Heterodoxology

Religion and Scientific Change: The Case of the New Natural Theologies between the World Wars (2/2)

Today, July 4 2012, Cern announced the likely detection of the elusive Higgs boson – known by the popular press as the “God particle”.

Last installment of my lecture on “Religion and Scientific Change” closed by introducing three levels on which claims about relationships between religion and science should be analysed: the institutional, the socio-cultural, and the individual. I was going to wait a couple of days with releasing the rest, but since news headlines today have been all about the discovery of the “God particle” in the bowels of the Large Hydron Collider at Cern, it seemed highly appropriate to continue. Why is it that such a (truth be told, rather ridiculous) religious pet-name has been put on the elusive boson? Read on, and you might find out. (And: happy Higgs boson day!)

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on July 4, 2012 at 3:15 pm Comments (4)
Tags: Adam Gifford, Bill Clinton, Carl Gustav Jung, Cern, Dick Teresi, discovery enthusiasm, DNA, entelechy, Forman thesis, Francis Collins, Gifford Lectures, God particle, Hans Driesch, Higgs boson, Human Genome Project, Large Hydron Collider, Leon Lederman, Niels Bohr, Paul Forman, uncertainty principle, vitalism, Werner Heisenberg, World War I

Blind Spots of Disenchantment (2/3)

Following up the previous post about Weber’s notion of disenchantment, and its normative implications, this second part of the installment provides some snapshots of episodes in the early 20th century – that is, of Weber’s contemporaries – which all seem to be in conflict with the disenchanted perspective of science. We start by considering some episodes in physics, then move on to the life sciences, before ending with some remarks on the controversial borderland which is psychical research.

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on May 30, 2011 at 2:35 pm Comments (4)
Tags: animism, Anne Harrington, élan vital, behaviourism, causality, disenchantment, entelechy, Hans Driesch, Henri Bergson, holism, incalculability, John Watson, Lamarckism, Lebensphilosophie, Max Weber, neo-vitalism, Niels Bohr, organicism, Paul Forman, Society for Psychical Research, Werner Heisenberg, William McDougall

“Emic historiography of science” – a possibly useful term

It’s been silent here for a while. My excuse is a lot of traveling and lecturing over the past month. In trying to get back to blogging, I’ll give some thoughts on a concept I’ve been thinking about in connection with one of the lectures in Trondheim a few weeks ago: “emic historiography of science”.

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on November 6, 2010 at 5:36 pm Comments (9)
Tags: Arthur Eddington, emic historiography, Forman thesis, Fritjof Capra, New Age science, Paul Forman, Peter J. Bowler, quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg

Physics, Psychology, and a 20th Century Esoteric Concept

Carl Gustav Jung

Last week in the MA course we are currently running on “Esotericism and modern science” (I’ve written about previous classes here, here, here, here and here) we talked about the encounter between two influential thinkers of very different impact: psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) and theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958). Two men who led at the surface very different careers; one a disciple of Freud and crown-prince of psychoanalysis, the other a student of Bohr and a co-creator of quantum mechanics. While Pauli gave name to the exclusion principle, Jung developed concepts of psychological archetypes and the collective unconscious, established his own school of “analytic psychology”, and arguably founded a charismatic cult of personality which still greatly influences new age religion, pagan spirituality and other occultural belief systems.

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