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Description
This essay explores the role of religion, science, and the secular in contemporary society by showing their connection to social and political legitimacy as a result of historical processes. In Chapter One, the essay presents historical arguments, particularly linguistic, which confirm science and religion as historically created categories without timeless or essential differences. Additionally, the current institutional separation of science and religion was politically motivated by the changing power structures following the Protestant Reformation. In Chapter Two, the essay employs the concept of the modern social imaginary to show how our modern concept of the political and the secular subtly reproduce the objectified territories of science and religion and thus the boundary maintenance dialectic which dominates science-religion discourse. Chapter Three argues that ‘religious’ worldviews contain genuine metaphysical claims which do not recognizably fit into these modern social categories. Given the destabilizing forces of globalization and information technology upon the political authority of the nation-state, the way many conceptualize of these objects religion, science, and the secular will change as well.
ContributorsBianchi, Joseph Anthony (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis director) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
By utilizing words, photographs, and motion pictures, this multimodal and multisited project traces a rhizomatic genealogy of Russian Cosmism—a nineteenth century political theology promoting a universal human program for overcoming death, resurrecting ancestors, and traveling through the cosmos—amongst post-Soviet techno-utopian projects and imaginaries. I illustrate how Cosmist techno-utopian, futurist, and other-than-human discourse exist as Weberian “elective affinities” within diverse ecologies of the imagination, transmitting a variety of philosophies and political programs throughout trans-temporal, yet philosophically bounded, communities. With a particular focus on the United States and Ukraine, and taking an apophatic analytical position, I dissect how different groups of philosophers, technologists, and publics interact(ed) with Cosmism, as well as how seemingly disparate communities (re)shape and deterritorialize Cosmist political theology in an attempt to legitimize their constructed political imaginaries.
ContributorsGenovese, Taylor (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis advisor) / Avina, Alexander (Committee member) / Messeri, Lisa (Committee member) / Josephson Storm, Jason Ā (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023