Jason Ā Josephson-Storm
Biographic Data
| ID | 6553026 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jason Ā Josephson-Storm |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jason Ā |
| FAMILY NAME | Josephson-Storm |
| SIGNATURE | JOSEPHSON-STORM J Ā |
| AFFILIATIONS | Williams College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Max Weber and the Rationalization of Magic
The Ghosts of Metaphysics
Chapter 9 explores the connections between the Vienna Circle of positivism and the esoteric milieu. It shows how the founders of logical positivism, such as Otto Neurath, presented their philosophy as a kind of magical revival. It also demonstrates that other positivists—such as Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Kurt Gödel—had a pro-found preoccupation with ghosts and the paranormal. Taken as a whole, the book demonstrates how magic, like metaphysics…
The Revival of Magick
This chapter turns to the infamous British magician Aleister Crowley, who overlapped with Frazer at Trinity College, Cambridge. This chapter shows that Crowley drew on the very text in which Frazer worked out disenchantment to stage his revival of modern “magick” [sic]. Hence, the narrative of disenchantment was self-refuting insofar as it reinvigorated the very thing it described as endangered.
Revenge of the Magicians
This chapter takes as its starting point various figures—from Giordano Bruno to Isaac Newton—who have been blamed for the rise of instrumental reason and the disenchantment of nature, and it demonstrates their respective magical projects. It then recovers two moments often seen as the watershed of modernity—Francis Bacon’s formulation of the scientific method and the French philosophes’ publication of the Encyclopédie—to demonstrate that neither …
Enchanted (Post) Modernity
This chapter takes as its starting point present-day sociology and anthropology. It shows that today in neither Europe, nor America, nor the rest of the globe can one find the disenchanted world anticipated by the major theorists of modernity. It then uses sociological data to explore the function of enchantment today. Moreover, it unlinks traditional accounts of secularization and disenchantment to show that in many cases ghost and spirits come …
Dialectic of Darkness
“Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory,” focuses on the German neo-pagan poet and philosopher Ludwig Klages, who formulated much of the terminology and critique of modernity as the “domination of nature” that would later become associated with the Frankfurt School. It then looks at Klages’s influence on German-Jewish philosopher and literary theorist Walter Benjamin, demonstrating that much of the terminology that seem…
The Decline of Magic
Chapter 5 argues that James Frazer came late to the narrative of magical decline, and that he did so within a context of psychical research and in the face of a folkloric narrative itself about the departure of fairies and the decline of magic. It shows how Frazer formulated an influential trinary opposition between religion, magic, and science while encoding this typology within a disenchantment narrative. It also recovers a lot theory, Frazer's…
The Shadow of God
“The Shadow of God,” highlights a crucially important dialectical movement. It shows how a putative opposition between religion and science, combined with fears of despiritualization and mourning for the death of God, motivated the rise of spiritualism and occult movements, and contributed to the birth of religious studies as a discipline. Looking at Edward Burnett Tylor, Friedrich Max Müller, Éliphas Lévi, and Helena Blavatsky, it demonstrates h…
Conclusion
The conclusion spells out the implications of the work as a whole. It addresses three Foucauldian doubts about the myth of disenchantment or “modernity paradigm” that have been animating this work as a whole: the historical doubt (is the disenchantment of the world truly an established historical pattern?), the critical-historical doubt (how, in the face of vibrant spiritualist and magical movements, did European societies come to think of themse…
The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History
The final chapter, "The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History," focuses on Max Weber's preoccupation with "disenchantment" (Entzauberung) in the same period that Freud was formulating his own version of that myth. It complexies conventional readings of disenchantment by showing how the term fit into Weber's theory of rationalization. Examining a set of Weber's letters that have only recently been made available to scholars, th…
The Black Tide
"The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival,” shifts the focus back to the German-speaking world. It begins with Sigmund Freud’s references in The Interpretation of Dreams to a “brilliant mystic” named Carl du Prel. It explores one of Freud’s interlocutors, the German-Jewish physician Max Nordau, who theorized his own conception of degeneration alongside a broader contention that modernity led to irrationalization and m…
The Myth of Disenchantment
The Myth of Absence
"The Myth of Absence," traces the myth that the philosophes and the mechanistic cosmology had eliminated the divine. It demonstrates that several key mythemes—the mythless age, the de-divination of nature, nihilism, and the death of God—had a conjoined genesis in German philosophical circles several decades before Nietzsche. Focusing on the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Jacobi, and Friedrich Schiller, it shows how a g…
The Myth of Disenchantment
The Myth of Disenchantment
The Superstition, Secularism, and Religion Trinary
While a generation of theorists assumed that secularization was a necessary outcome of modernization, a newer group of scholars have argued that Western Christendom constructed a normative binary opposition between the “religious” and the “secular,” which it then attempted to impose globally. This putative binary has been interrogated in a number of ways. This paper articulates a productive recent line of approach, I initially proposed in The Inv…
The Superstition, Secularism, and Religion Trinary
While a generation of theorists assumed that secularization was a necessary outcome of modernization, a newer group of scholars have argued that Western Christendom constructed a normative binary opposition between the “religious” and the “secular,” which it then attempted to impose globally. This putative binary has been interrogated in a number of ways. This paper articulates a productive recent line of approach, I initially proposed in The Inv…
The Ghosts of Metaphysics
Chapter 9 explores the connections between the Vienna Circle of positivism and the esoteric milieu. It shows how the founders of logical positivism, such as Otto Neurath, presented their philosophy as a kind of magical revival. It also demonstrates that other positivists—such as Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Kurt Gödel—had a pro-found preoccupation with ghosts and the paranormal. Taken as a whole, the book demonstrates how magic, like metaphysics…
The Revival of Magick
This chapter turns to the infamous British magician Aleister Crowley, who overlapped with Frazer at Trinity College, Cambridge. This chapter shows that Crowley drew on the very text in which Frazer worked out disenchantment to stage his revival of modern “magick” [sic]. Hence, the narrative of disenchantment was self-refuting insofar as it reinvigorated the very thing it described as endangered.
Revenge of the Magicians
This chapter takes as its starting point various figures—from Giordano Bruno to Isaac Newton—who have been blamed for the rise of instrumental reason and the disenchantment of nature, and it demonstrates their respective magical projects. It then recovers two moments often seen as the watershed of modernity—Francis Bacon’s formulation of the scientific method and the French philosophes’ publication of the Encyclopédie—to demonstrate that neither …
Enchanted (Post) Modernity
This chapter takes as its starting point present-day sociology and anthropology. It shows that today in neither Europe, nor America, nor the rest of the globe can one find the disenchanted world anticipated by the major theorists of modernity. It then uses sociological data to explore the function of enchantment today. Moreover, it unlinks traditional accounts of secularization and disenchantment to show that in many cases ghost and spirits come …
Dialectic of Darkness
“Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory,” focuses on the German neo-pagan poet and philosopher Ludwig Klages, who formulated much of the terminology and critique of modernity as the “domination of nature” that would later become associated with the Frankfurt School. It then looks at Klages’s influence on German-Jewish philosopher and literary theorist Walter Benjamin, demonstrating that much of the terminology that seem…
The Decline of Magic
Chapter 5 argues that James Frazer came late to the narrative of magical decline, and that he did so within a context of psychical research and in the face of a folkloric narrative itself about the departure of fairies and the decline of magic. It shows how Frazer formulated an influential trinary opposition between religion, magic, and science while encoding this typology within a disenchantment narrative. It also recovers a lot theory, Frazer's…
The Shadow of God
“The Shadow of God,” highlights a crucially important dialectical movement. It shows how a putative opposition between religion and science, combined with fears of despiritualization and mourning for the death of God, motivated the rise of spiritualism and occult movements, and contributed to the birth of religious studies as a discipline. Looking at Edward Burnett Tylor, Friedrich Max Müller, Éliphas Lévi, and Helena Blavatsky, it demonstrates h…
Conclusion
The conclusion spells out the implications of the work as a whole. It addresses three Foucauldian doubts about the myth of disenchantment or “modernity paradigm” that have been animating this work as a whole: the historical doubt (is the disenchantment of the world truly an established historical pattern?), the critical-historical doubt (how, in the face of vibrant spiritualist and magical movements, did European societies come to think of themse…
The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History
The final chapter, "The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History," focuses on Max Weber's preoccupation with "disenchantment" (Entzauberung) in the same period that Freud was formulating his own version of that myth. It complexies conventional readings of disenchantment by showing how the term fit into Weber's theory of rationalization. Examining a set of Weber's letters that have only recently been made available to scholars, th…
The Black Tide
"The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival,” shifts the focus back to the German-speaking world. It begins with Sigmund Freud’s references in The Interpretation of Dreams to a “brilliant mystic” named Carl du Prel. It explores one of Freud’s interlocutors, the German-Jewish physician Max Nordau, who theorized his own conception of degeneration alongside a broader contention that modernity led to irrationalization and m…
The Myth of Disenchantment
The Myth of Absence
"The Myth of Absence," traces the myth that the philosophes and the mechanistic cosmology had eliminated the divine. It demonstrates that several key mythemes—the mythless age, the de-divination of nature, nihilism, and the death of God—had a conjoined genesis in German philosophical circles several decades before Nietzsche. Focusing on the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Jacobi, and Friedrich Schiller, it shows how a g…
The Myth of Disenchantment
The Myth of Disenchantment
The Superstition, Secularism, and Religion Trinary
While a generation of theorists assumed that secularization was a necessary outcome of modernization, a newer group of scholars have argued that Western Christendom constructed a normative binary opposition between the “religious” and the “secular,” which it then attempted to impose globally. This putative binary has been interrogated in a number of ways. This paper articulates a productive recent line of approach, I initially proposed in The Inv…
Max Weber and the Rationalization of Magic
Philosophy (13 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Disenchantment (8 works) · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices (7 works) · Modernity (6 works)